[ William Barrett] Irrational Man A Study In Exis(b Ok.xyz)

IRRATIONAL MAN

William Barrett, a native of New York City, is pro¬
fessor of philosophy at New York University. He re¬
ceived his Ph.D. degree at Columbia and has, ever
since, been one of the most original voices in American
philosophy. For several years an editor of Partisan
Review and now literary critic of The Atlantic, Pro¬
fessor Barrett has always sought to bring academic
philosophy into touch with the concrete realities of
modem life. He was among the first—and remains the
best—of that small group of philosophers in this coun¬
try who, shortly after the war, introduced European
existentialism to America.

IRRATIONAL MAN

A Study in Existential Philosophy
WILLIAM BARRETT

DOUBLEDAY ANCHOR BOOKS
DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.,
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

For Jason

whose friendship has meant much

Doubleday & Company, Inc., would like to thank the
publishers for their kind permission to reprint quota¬
tions from the following books:

A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway. Used by
permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner’s Sons.
The Republic of Silence, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Used
by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
What Is Literature?, by Jean-Paul Sartre. Reprinted
by permission of the publishers, Philosophical Library.
A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster. Reprinted by
permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.,
New York, and Edward Arnold, Ltd., London.
Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, “Stones
of Philosophy,” by Jean Dubuffet, preface to an ex¬
hibition of paintings by Dubuffet at the Pierre Ma¬
tisse Gallery, February 12, 1952. Used by permission
of the Pierre Matisse Gallery.

author’s note

I wish to thank Mr. Andrew Chiappe and Miss Cath¬
erine Carver for reading the manuscript and making
many valuable suggestions for its improvement.
Irrational Man was originally published by Double¬
day & Company, Inc. in 1958.

Anchor Books edition: 1962

Copyright © 1958 by William Barrett
All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

I: “THE PRESENT AGE”

x: The Advent of Existentialism 3

2: The Encounter with Nothingness 23

3: The Testimony of Modem Art 42

H: THE SOURCES OF EXISTENTIALISM

IN THE WESTERN TRADITION
4: Hebraism and Hellenism 69

5: Christian Sources 9a

6: The Flight from Laputa lao

IH: THE EXISTENTIALISTS

7: Kierkegaard 149

8: Nietzsche 177

9: Heidegger 2,06

10: Sartre 239

IV: INTEGRAL VS. RATIONAL MAN

11: The Place of the Furies 267

appendices:

Negation, Finitude, and the Nature

of Man 283

Existence and Analytic Philosophers 295

INDEX

307

"THE PRESENT AGE”

Part One

THE ADVENT OF
EXISTENTIALISM

Chapter One

The story is told (by Kierkegaard) of the absent-minded
man so abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows
he exists until, one fine morning, he wakes up to find him¬
self dead. It is a story that has a special point today, since
this civilization of ours has at last got its hands on weapons
with which it could easily bring upon itself the fate of
Kierkegaard’s hero: we could wake up tomorrow morning
dead—and without ever having touched the roots of our own
existence. There is by this time widespread anxiety and
even panic over the dangers of the atomic age; but the pub¬
lic soul-searching and stocktaking rarely, if ever, go to the
heart of the matter. We do not ask ourselves what the ulti¬
mate ideas behind our civilization are that have brought us
into this danger; we do not search for the h uma n face be¬
hind the bewildering array of instruments that man has
forged; in a word, we do not dare to be philosophical. Un¬
easy as we are over the atomic age, on the crucial question
of existence itself we choose to remain as absent-minded as
the man in Kierkegaard’s story. One reason we do so lies
in the curiously remote position to which modem society
has relegated philosophy, and which philosophers them¬
selves have been content to accept.

If philosophers are really to deal with the problem of hu¬
man existence—and no other professional group in society
is likely to take over the job for them—they might very well
begin by asking: How does philosophy itself exist at the

4

IRRATIONAL MAN

present time? Or, more concretely: How do philosophers
exist in the modem world? Nothing very high-flown, meta¬
physical, or even abstract is intended by this question; and
our preliminary answer to it is equally concrete and prosy.
Philosophers today exist in the Academy, as members of
departments of philosophy in universities, as professional
teachers of a more or less theoretical subject known as phi¬
losophy. This simple observation, baldly factual and almost
statistical, does not seem to take us very deeply into the
abstruse problem of existence; but every effort at under¬
standing must take off from our actual situation, the point
at which we stand. “Know thyself!” is the command Soc¬
rates issued to philosophers at the beginning (or very close
to it) of all Western philosophy; and contemporary philoso¬
phers might start on the journey of self-knowledge by com¬
ing to terms with the somewhat grubby and uninspiring
fact of the social status of philosophy as a profession. It is
in any case a fact with some interesting ambiguities.

To profess, according to the dictionary, is to confess or
declare openly, and therefore publicly; consequently, to
acknowledge a calling before the world. So the word bears
originally a religious connotation, as when we speak of a
profession of faith. But in our present society, with its elabo¬
rate subdividing of human functions, a profession is the
specialized social task—requiring expertness and know-how
—that one performs for pay: it is a living, one’s livelihood.
Professional people are lawyers, doctors, dentists, engineers
—and also professors of philosophy. The profession of the
philosopher in the modern world is to be a professor of
philosophy; and the realm of Being which the philosopher
inhabits as a living individual is no more recondite than a
comer within the university.

Not enough has been made of this academic existence
of the philosopher, though some contemporary Existential¬
ists have directed searching comment upon it. The price one
pays for having a profession is a deformation professionelle,
as the French put it—a professional deformation. Doctors
and engineers tend to see things from the viewpoint of their
own specialty, and usually show a very marked blind spot

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM

5

to whatever falls outside this particular province. The more
specialized a vision the sharper its focus; but also the more
nearly total the blind spot toward all things that he on the
periphery of this focus. As a human being, functioning
professionally within the Academy, the philosopher can
hardly be expected to escape his own professional deforma¬
tion, especially since it has become a law of modem society
that man is assimilated more and more completely to his
social function. And it is just here that a troublesome and
profound ambiguity resides for the philosopher today. The
profession of philosophy did not always have the narrow
and specialized meaning it now has. In ancient Greece it
had the very opposite: instead of a specialized theoretical
discipline philosophy there was a concrete way of life, a
total vision of man and the cosmos in the light of which the
individual’s whole life was to be lived. These earliest phi¬
losophers among the Greeks were seers, poets, almost
shamans—as well as the first thinkers. Mythological and in¬
tuitive elements permeate their thinking even where we see
the first historical efforts toward conceptualization; they
traffic with the old gods even while in the process of coining
a new significance for them; and everywhere in the frag¬
ments of these pre-Socratic Greeks is the sign of a revelation
greater than themselves which they are unveiling for the
rest of mankind. Even in Plato, where the thought has
already become more differentiated and specialized and
where the main lines of philosophy as a theoretical disci¬
pline are being laid down, the motive of philosophy is very
different from the cool pursuit of the savant engaged in re¬
search. Philosophy is for Plato a passionate way of fife; and
the imperishable example of Socrates, who lived and died
for the philosophic life, was the guiding fine of Plato’s
career for five decades after his master’s death. Philosophy
is the soul’s search for salvation, which means for Plato de¬
liverance from the suffering and evils of the natural world.
Even today the motive for an Oriental’s taking up the study
of philosophy is altogether different from that of a Western
student: for the Oriental the only reason for bothering with
philosophy is to find release or peace from the torments

6

IRRATIONAL MAN

and perplexities of life. Philosophy can never quite divest
itself of these aboriginal claims. They are part of the past,
which is never lost, lurking under the veneer of even the
most sophisticatedly rational of contemporary philosophies;
and even those philosophers who have altogether forsworn
the great vision are called upon, particularly by the layman
who may not be aware of the historical fate of specializa¬
tion that has fallen upon philosophy, to give answers to the
great questions.

The ancient claims of philosophy are somewhat embar¬
rassing to the contemporary philosopher, who has to justify
his existence within the sober community of professional
savants and scientists. The modern university is as much an
expression of the specialization of the age as is the modem
factory. Moreover, the philosopher knows that everything
we prize about our modem knowledge, each thing in it that
represents an immense stride in certainty and power over
what the past called its knowledge, is the result of special¬
ization. Modem science was made possible by the social
organization of knowledge. The philosopher today is there¬
fore pressed, and simply by reason of his objective social
role in the community, into an imitation of the scientist:
he too seeks to perfect the weapons of his knowledge
through specialization. Hence the extraordinary preoccupa¬
tion with technique among modem philosophers, with logi¬
cal and linguistic analysis, syntax and semantics; and in
general with the refining away of all content for the sake
of formal subtlety. The movement known as Logical Posi¬
tivism, in this country (the atmosphere of humanism is
probably more dominant in the European universities than
here in the United States), actually trafficked upon the
guilt philosophers felt at not being scientists; that is, at not
being researchers producing reliable knowledge in the mode
of science. The natural insecurity of philosophers, which in
any case lies at the core of their whole uncertain enterprise,
was here aggravated beyond measure by the insistence that
they transform themselves into scientists.

Specialization is the price we pay for the advancement
of knowledge. A price, because the path of specialization

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM

7

leads away from the ordinary and concrete acts of under¬
standing in terms of which man actually lives his day-to-
day life. It used to be said (I do not know whether this
would still hold today) that if a dozen men were to die the
meaning of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity would be lost to
mankind. No mathematician today can embrace the whole
of his subject as did the great Gauss little more than a cen¬
tury ago. The philosopher who has pursued his own special¬
ized path leading away from the urgent and the actual may
claim that his situation parallels that of the scientist, that
his own increasing remoteness from life merely demonstrates
the inexorable law of advancing knowledge. But the cases
are in fact not parallel; for out of the abstractions that only
a handful of experts can understand the physicist is able
to detonate a bomb that alters—and can indeed put an end
to—the life of ordinary mankind. The philosopher has no
such explosive effect upon the life of his time. In fact, if
they were candid, philosophers today would recognize that
they have less and less influence upon the minds around
them. To the degree that their existence has become special¬
ized and academic, their importance beyond the university
cloisters has declined. Their disputes have become disputes
among themselves; and far from gaining the enthusiastic
support needed for a strong popular movement, they now
have little contact with whatever general intellectual elite
still remain here outside the Academy. John Dewey was the
last American philosopher to have any widespread influence
on non-academic life in this country.

Such was the general philosophic situation here when,
after the Second World War, the news of Existentialism
arrived. It was news, which is in itself an unusual thing for
philosophy these days. True, the public interest was not
altogether directed toward the philosophic matters in ques¬
tion. It was news from France, and therefore distinguished
by the particular color and excitement that French intel¬
lectual life is able to generate. French Existentialism was
a kind of Bohemian ferment in Paris; it had, as a garnish
for the philosophy, the cult its younger devotees had made

8

IRRATIONAL MAN

of night-club hangouts, American jazz, special hairdos and
style of dress. All this made news for American journalists
trying to report on the life that had gone on in Paris during
the war and the German Occupation. Moreover, Existen¬
tialism was a literary movement as well, and its leaders—
Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir—were
brilliant and engaging writers. Nevertheless, that the Amer¬
ican public was curious about the philosophy itself cannot
altogether be denied. Perhaps the curiosity consisted in
large part of wanting to know what the name, the big word,
meant; nothing stirs up popular interest so much as a slo¬
gan. But there was also a genuine philosophic curiosity,
however inchoate, in all this, for here was a movement that
seemed to convey a message and a meaning to a good many
people abroad, and Americans wanted to know about it
The desire for meaning still slumbers, though submerged,
beneath the extroversion of American life.

The philosophic news from France was only a small de¬
tail in the history of the postwar years. French Existential¬
ism, as a cult, is now as dead as last year’s fad. Its leaders,
to be sure, are still flourishing: Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir are still phenomenally productive, though in the
case of Sartre we feel that he has already made at least
his penultimate statement, so that now we have his message
pretty completely; Albert Camus, the most sensitive and
searching of the trio, long ago split off from the group, but
has continued his exploration into themes that belonged to
the original Existentialist preoccupations. As news and ex¬
citement, the movement is altogether dead; and yet it has
left its mark on nearly all the writing and thinking of Eu¬
rope of the last ten years. During the grim decade of the
Cold War no intellectual movement of comparable impor¬
tance appeared. Existentialism is the best in the way of a
new and creative movement that these rather uninspired
postwar years have been able to turn up. We have to say
at least this in a spirit of cool critical assessment, even
when we acknowledge all the frivolous and sensational ele¬
ments that got attached to it.

The important thing, to repeat, was that here was a phi-

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM

9

losophy that was able to cross the frontier from the Acad¬
emy into the world at large. This should have been a
welcome sign to professional philosophers that ordinary
mankind still could hunger and thirst after philosophy if
what they were given to bite down on was something that
seemed to have a connection with their lives. Instead, the
reception given the new movement by philosophers was
anything but cordial. Existentialism was rejected, often
without very much scrutiny, as sensationalism or mere “psy¬
chologizing,” a literary attitude, postwar despair, nihilism,
or heaven knows what besides. The very themes of Ex¬
istentialism were something of a scandal to the detached
sobriety of Anglo-American philosophy. Such matters as
anxiety, death, the conflict between the bogus and the gen¬
uine self, the faceless man of the masses, the experience of
the death of God are scarcely the themes of analytic phi¬
losophy. Yet they are themes of life: People do die, people
do struggle all their lives between the demands of real and
counterfeit selves, and we do live in an age in which neu¬
rotic anxiety has mounted out of all proportion so that even
minds inclined to believe that all human problems can
be solved by physical techniques begin to label “mental
health” as the first of our public problems. The reaction of
professional philosophers to Existentialism was merely a
symptom of their imprisonment in the narrowness of their
own discipline. Never was the professional deformation
more in evidence. The divorce of mind from life was some¬
thing that had happened to philosophers simply in the pur¬
suit of their own specialized problems. Since philosophers
are only a tiny fraction of the general population, the mat¬
ter would not be worth laboring were it not that this divorce
of mind from life happens also to be taking place, cata¬
strophically, in modem civilization everywhere. It happens
too, as we shall see, to be one of the central themes of
existential philosophy—for which we may in time owe it no
small debt.

All of this has to be said even when we do concede a
certain sensational and youthfully morbid side to French
Existentialism. The genius of Sartre—and by this time there

10

IRRATIONAL MAN

can scarcely be doubt that it is real genius—has an unde¬
niably morbid side. But there is no human temperament
that does not potentially reveal some truth, and Sartre’s
morbidity has its own unique and revelatory power. It is
true also that a good deal in French Existentialism was the
expression of an historical mood—the shambles of defeat
after the “phony war” and the experience of utter derelic¬
tion under the German Occupation. But are moods of this
kind so unimportant and trifling as to be unworthy of the
philosopher’s consideration? Would it not in fact be a se¬
rious and appropriate task for the philosopher to elaborate
what is involved in certain basic human moods? We are
living in an epoch that has produced two world wars, and
these wars were not merely passing incidents but charac¬
terize the age down to its marrow; surely a philosophy that
has experienced these wars may be said to have some con¬
nection with the life of its time. Philosophers who dismissed
Existentialism as “merely a mood” or “a postwar mood” be¬
trayed a curious blindness to the concerns of the human
spirit, in taking the view that philosophic truth can be
found only in those areas of experience in which human
moods are not present.

Naturally enough, something very deeply American
came to the surface in this initial response to Existentialism.
Once again the old drama of America confronting Europe
was being played out. Existentialism was so definitely a Eu¬
ropean expression that its very sombemess went against the
grain of our native youthfulness and optimism. The new
philosophy was not a peculiarly French phenomenon, but
a creation of the western European continent at the mo¬
ment in history when all of its horizons—political as well
as spiritual—were rapidly shrinking. The American has not
yet assimilated psychologically the disappearance of his
own geographical frontier, his spiritual horizon is still the
limitless play of human possibilities, and as yet he has not
lived through the crucial experience of human finitude.

(This last is still only an abstract phrase to him.) The ex¬
pression of themes like those of Existentialism was bound

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM

11

to strike the American as a symptom of despair and defeat,
and, generally, of the declining vigor of a senescent civiliza¬
tion, But America, spiritually speaking, is still tied to Eu¬
ropean civilization, even though the political power lines
now run the other way; and these European expressions
simply point out the path that America itself will have
eventually to tread; when it does it will know at last what
the European is talking about.

It is necessary thus to emphasize the European—rather
than the specifically French—origins of Existentialism, since
in its crucial issues the whole meaning of European civiliza¬
tion (of which we in America are still both descendants and
dependents) is radically put in question. Jean-Paul Sartre
is not Existentialism—it still seems necessary to make this
point for American readers; he does not even represent, as
we shall see later, the deepest impulse of this philosophy.
Now that French Existentialism as a popular movement
(once even something of a popular nuisance) is safely dead,
having left a few new reputations surviving in its wake, we
can see it much more clearly for what it is—a small branch
of a very much larger tree. And the roots of this larger tree
reach down into the remotest depths of the Western tradi¬
tion. Even in the portions of the tree more immediately visi¬
ble to our contemporary eyes, we have something which is
the combined product of many European thinkers, some of
them operating in radically different national traditions.
Sartre’s immediate sources, for example, are German: Mar¬
tin Heidegger (1889- ) and Karl Jaspers (1883-

), and for his method the great German phenomenol-
ogist, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Heidegger and
Jaspers are, strictly speaking, the creators of existential
philosophy in this century: they have given it its decisive
stamp, brought its problems to new and more precise ex¬
pression, and in general formed the model around which
the thinking of all the other Existentialists revolves. Neither
Heidegger nor Jaspers created their philosophies out of
whole cloth; the atmosphere of German philosophy during
the first part of this century had become quickened by the
search for a new “philosophical anthropology”—a new in-

12

IRRATIONAL MAN

terpretation of man-made necessary by the extraordinary
additions to knowledge in all of the special sciences that
dealt with man. Here particularly the name of Max Scheler
(1874-1928), usually not classed as an “existentialist,”
must be mentioned, for his great sensitivity to this new con¬
crete data from psychology and the social sciences, but
most of all for his penetrating grasp of the fact that modem
man had become in his very essence problematic. Both
Scheler and Heidegger owe a great debt to Husserl, yet
the relation of the latter to Existentialism is extremely para¬
doxical. By temperament Husserl was the anti-modernist
par excellence among modem philosophers; he was a pas¬
sionate exponent of classical rationalism, whose single and
exalted aim was to ground the rationality of man upon a
more adequate and comprehensive basis than the past had
achieved. Yet by insisting that the philosopher must cast
aside preconceptions in attending to the actual concrete
data of experience, Husserl flung wide the doors of philoso¬
phy to the rich existential content that his more radical fol¬
lowers were to quarry. In his last writings Husserl’s thought
even turns slowly and haltingly in the direction of Heideg¬
ger’s themes. The great rationalist is dragged slowly to
earth.

But what lifted Heidegger and Jaspers above the level of
their contemporary philosophic atmosphere and impelled
them to give a new voice to the intellectual consciousness
of the age was their decisive relation to two older nine¬
teenth-century thinkers: S oren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Jaspers has been
the more outspoken in acknowledging this filial relation¬
ship: the philosopher, he says, who has really experienced
the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche can never again
philosophize in the traditional mode of academic philoso¬
phy. Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche was an academic
philosopher; Nietzsche, for seven years a professor of Greek
at Basel in Switzerland, did his most radical philosophizing
after he had fled from the world of the university and its
sober community of scholars; Kierkegaard never held an
academic chair. Neither developed a system; both in fact

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM

13

gibed at systematizes and even the possibilities of a philo¬
sophic system; and while they proliferated in ideas that
were far in advance of their time and could be spelled out
only by the following century, these ideas were not the
stock themes of academic philosophy. Ideas are not even
the real subject matter of these philosophers—and this in
itself is something of a revolution in Western philosophy:
their central subject is the unique experience of the single
one, the individual, who chooses to place himself on trial
before the gravest question of his civilization. For both
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche this gravest question is Chris¬
tianity, though they were driven to opposite positions in
regard to it. Kierkegaard set himself the task of determin¬
ing whether Christianity can still be lived or whether a civi¬
lization still nominally Christian must finally confess spirit¬
ual bankruptcy; and all his ideas were simply sparks thrown
off in the fiery process of seeking to reab'ze the truth of
Christ in his own life. Nietzsche begins with the confession
of bankruptcy; God is dead, says Nietzsche, and European
man if he were more honest, courageous, and had keener
eyes for what went on in the depths of his own soul would
know that this death has taken place there, despite the lip
service still paid to the old formulae and ideals of religion.
Nietzsche experimented with his own life to be able to an¬
swer the question: What next? What happens to the race
when at long last it has severed the umbilical cord that
bound it for millennia to the gods and a transcendent
world beyond this earthly world? He placed his own life
on trial in order to experience this death of God to its
depths. More than thinkers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
were witnesses—witnesses who suffered for their time what
the time itself would not acknowledge as its own secret
wound. No concept or system of concepts lies at the center
of either of their philosophies, but rather the individual hu¬
man personality itself struggling for self-realization. No
wonder both are among the greatest of intuitive psychol¬
ogists.

Though Kierkegaard was a Dane, intellectual Denmark
in his time was a cultural province of Germany, and his

14

IRRATIONAL MAN

thought, nourished almost completely by German sources,
belongs ultimately within the wider tradition of German
philosophy. Modem existential philosophy is thus by and
large a creation of the German genius. It rises out of that
old strain of the Germanic mind which, since Meister Eck-
hart at the end of the Middle Ages, has sought to give voice
to the deepest inwardness of European man. But this voice
is also a thoroughly modem one and speaks neither with
the serene mysticism of Eckhart nor with the intellectual
intoxication and dreaminess of German idealism. Here in¬
troversion has come face to face with its other, the concrete
actualities of life before which the older German philoso¬
phy had remained in wool-gathering abstraction; face to
face with historical crisis; with time, death, and personal
anxiety.

Yet modem Existentialism is not of exclusively German
provenance; rather it is a total European creation, perhaps
the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or what¬
ever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.
The number of European thinkers of widely varying racial
and national traditions who have collaborated in the fab¬
rication of existential philosophy is much larger than the
public, still somewhat bedazzled by French Existentialism,
imagines. The picture of French Existentialism itself is not
complete without the figure of Gabriel Marcel (1889-
), Sartre’s extreme opposite and trenchant critic, a de¬
vout Catholic whose philosophic sources are not German
at all, but are surprisingly enough the American idealist
Josiah Royce and the French intuitionist Henri Bergson,
According to the record he has left in his Metaphysical
Journal, Marcel’s existentialism developed out of purely
personal experience, and perhaps that is its greatest
significance for us, whatever final value his philosophic for¬
mulations may have. The intimacy and concreteness of per¬
sonal feeling taught Marcel the incompleteness of all phi¬
losophies that deal purely in intellectual abstractions. But
the door that opened upon this experience was Bergson’s
doctrine of intuition; and the figure of Henri Bergson
(1859-1941) cannot really be omitted from any historical

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM

15

sketch of modem existential philosophy, Without Bergson
the whole atmosphere in which Existentialists have philoso¬
phized would not have been what it was. He was the first
to insist on the insufficiency of the abstract intelligence to
grasp the richness of experience, on the urgent and irreduci¬
ble reality of time, and—perhaps in the long run the most
significant insight of all—on the inner depth of the psychic
life which cannot be measured by the quantitative methods
of the physical sciences; and for making all of these points
the Existentialists stand greatly in his debt. Yet, from the
existential point of view, there is a curious incompleteness
about Bergson’s thinking, as if he never came really to grips
with the central subject, Man, but remained perpetually
dodging and tacking about on its periphery. Certain prem¬
ises of Bergson’s thought—which remain, to be sure, little
more than premises—are more radical than any the Ex¬
istentialists have yet explored. Bergson’s reputation except
in France has greatly fallen off, but he is due for a revival,
at which time hindsight will enable us to see that his phi¬
losophy contains much more than it seemed to, even at the
height of his fame.

The Russians (White Russians, of course) have con¬
tributed three typical and interesting figures to Existential¬
ism: Vladimir Solovev (1853-1900), Leon Shestov (1868-
1938), and Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), of whom only
the last seems to be known in this country. These men are
all spiritual children of Dostoevski, and they bring a pe¬
culiarly Russian vision to Existentialism: total, extreme, and
apocalyptic. Solovev, primarily a theologian and religious
writer, belonged to the first generation that felt the impact
of Dostoevski as both prophet and novelist, and he develops
the typically Dostoevskian position that there can be no
compromise between the spirit of rationalism and the spirit
of religion. Both Berdyaev and Shestov were Russian
emigres, cosmopolitans of the spirit, but nevertheless re¬
mained Russian to the core; and their writings, like those
of the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, can
show us what the mind of western Europe, the heir of
classicism and rationalism, looks like to an outsider—partic-

l6 IRRATIONAL MAN

ularly to a Russian outsider who will be satisfied with no
philosophic answers that fall short of the total and passion¬
ate feelings of his own humanity.

Modem Spain has contributed two figures to existential
philosophy, in Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) and
Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955). Unamuno, a poet first
and last, wrote one of the most moving and genuine philo¬
sophic books of the whole movement; his Tragic Sense of
Life is a work that fulfills, though in an anti-Nietzschean
sense, Nietzsche’s command to remain true to the earth.
Unamuno had read Kierkegaard, but his thought is an ex¬
pression of his own personal passion and of the Basque
earth from which he sprang. Ortega, a cooler and more
cosmopolitan figure, is best known in this country as the
social critic of The Revolt of the Masses. All the basic prem¬
ises of Ortega’s thought derive from modem German phi¬
losophy: so far as he philosophizes, his mind is Germanic;
but he was able to translate German philosophy into the
language of the people, without pedantry and jargon, and
particularly into the simplicity of an altogether alien lan¬
guage, Spanish, so that the translation itself becomes an
act of creative thought. Ortega loves to hide the profundity
of his thought behind the simple and casual language of a
journalist or belletrist.

On the outer edge of the German tradition moves the
remarkable figure of Martin Buber (1878- ), a Jew

whose culture is altogether Germanic but whose thought
after many peregrinations has succeeded in rediscovering
and anchoring itself profoundly to its Biblical and Hebraic
inheritance. Buber is one of the few thinkers who has suc¬
ceeded in the desperate modem search for roots, a fact with
which his work continuously impresses us. The image of
Biblical man moves like a shadow behind everything he
writes. His thinking has the narrowness and concrete power,
often the stubborn obstinacy, of Hebraism. At first glance
his contribution would seem to be the slenderest of all the
Existentialists, to be summed up in the title of his most
moving book, 1 and Thou. It is as if Buber had sought to
recast Kierkegaard’s dictum, “Purity of heart is to will one

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM

17

thing,” into: Depth of mind is to think one thought. But
this one thought—that meaning in life happens in the area
between person and person in that situation of contact
when one says I to the other’s Thou—is worth a lifetime’s
digging. In any case Buber is a necessary corrective to more
ambitious systematizes like Heidegger and Sartre.

Thus we see that Existentialism numbers among its
most powerful representatives Jews, Catholics, Protestants
—as well as atheists. Contrary to the first facile journalistic
reactions, the seriousness of existential thought does not
arise merely out of the despair of a world from which God
has departed. Such a generalization was prompted largely
by the identification of existential philosophy with the
school of Sartre. It should appear, from the foregoing
sketch, how tiny a fragment of Existentialism the Sartrian
school really does represent. So far as the central impulses
of existential thought are concerned, it does not altogether
matter, at least in one sense, in what religious sect a man
finally finds his home. Nor is it mere heterogenous lumping-
together to put Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and atheists un¬
der the rubric of one philosophy. This philosophy, as a par¬
ticular mode of human thought, is single even though its
practitioners wind up in different religious camps. What is
common, and central, to all these philosophers is that the
meaning of religion, and religious faith, is recast in relation
to the individual. Each has put religion itself radically in
question, and it is only to be expected that the faith, or the
denial of faith, that emerges in their thought should be
somewhat disconcerting to those who have followed the
more public and external paths into a church. Unamuno
seemed always on the verge of excommunication by the
Spanish bishops; Buber is a prophet with not very much
honor in his native land of Israel; and Kierkegaard fought
the last battle of his life against the ordained hierarchy of
the Danish Church. The atheist sect, on the other hand,
sniffs the taint of heresy in Heidegger, whose thought,
which he himself calls in one place a “waiting for god,”
has been criticized by one American philosopher as open-

l8 IRRATIONAL, MAN

ing the back door to theology. It is evident that anyone
who has passed through the depths of modem experience
and strives to place religion in relation to that experience is
bound to acquire the label of heretic.

Modern experience—an ambiguous enough term, to be
sure, and one that will require subsequent definition—is the
bond among these philosophers. The roster of names we
have given is hardly complete, but surely sufficient to in¬
dicate that Existentialism is not a passing fad or a mere
philosophic mood of the postwar period but a major move¬
ment of human thought that lies directly in the main
stream of modem history. Over the past hundred years the
development of philosophy has shown a remarkable en¬
largement of content, a progressive orientation toward the
immediate and qualitative, the existent and the actual—to¬
ward “concreteness and adequacy,” to use the words that
A. N. Whitehead borrowed from William James. Philoso¬
phers can no longer attempt, as the British empiricists
Locke and Hume attempted, to construct human experience
out of simple ideas and elementary sensations. The psychic
life of man is not a mosaic of such mental atoms, and phi¬
losophers were able to cling to this belief so long only be¬
cause they had put their own abstractions in place of
concrete experience. Thus Whitehead himself, who as a
Platonist can scarcely be lumped with the Existentialists,
nevertheless shares in this general existential trend within
modem philosophy when he describes philosophy itself as
“the critique of abstractions”—the endless effort to drag the
balloon of the mind back to the earth of actual experience.

Of all the non-European philosophers, William James
probably best deserves to be labeled an Existentialist. In¬
deed, at this late date, we may very well wonder whether
it would not be more accurate to call James an Existentialist
than a Pragmatist. What remains of American Pragmatism
today is forced to think of him as the black sheep of
the movement. Pragmatists nowadays acknowledge James’s
genius but are embarrassed by his extremes: by the una¬
shamedly personal tone of his philosophizing, his willing¬
ness to give psychology the final voice over logic where the

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM

19

two seem in conflict, and his belief in the revelatory value
of religious experience. There are pages in James that could
have been written by Kierkegaard, and the Epilogue to
Varieties of Religious Experience puts the case for the pri¬
macy of personal experience over abstraction as strongly as
any of the Existentialists has ever done. James’s vitupera¬
tion of rationalism is so passionate that latter-day Pragma¬
tists see their own residual rationalism of scientific method
thereby put in question. And it is not merely a matter of
tone, but of principle, that places James among the Exis¬
tentialists: he plumped for a world which contained con¬
tingency, discontinuity, and in which the centers of experi¬
ence were irreducibly plural and personal, as against a
“block” universe that could be enclosed in a single rational
system.

Pragmatism meant something more and different for
James than it did for Charles Sanders Peirce or John Dewey.
The contrast between James and Dewey, particularly, sheds
light on the precise point at which Pragmatism, in the strict
sense, ends and Existentialism begins. A comparison be¬
tween the earlier and the later writings of Dewey is almost
equally illuminating on the same point. Dewey is moving in
the general existential direction of modem philosophy with
his insistence that the modem philosopher must break with
the whole classical tradition of thought. He sees the “nega¬
tive” and destructive side of philosophy (with which Exis¬
tentialism has been so heavily taxed by its critics): every
thinker, Dewey tells us, puts some portion of the stable
world in danger as soon as he begins to think. The genial
inspiration that lies behind his whole rather gangling and
loose-jointed philosophy is the belief that in all depart¬
ments of human experience things do not fall from heaven
but grow up out of the earth. Thinking itself is only the
halting and fumbling effort of a thoroughly biological crea¬
ture to cope with his environment. The image of man as an
earth-bound and time-bound creature permeates Dewey’s
writings as it does that of the Existentialists—up to a point.
Beyond that point he moves in a direction that is the very
opposite of Existentialism. What Dewey never calls into

20

IRRATIONAL, MAN

question is the thing he labels Intelligence, which in his last
writings came to mean simply Scientific Method. Dewey
places the human person securely within his biological and
social context, but he never goes past this context into that
deepest center of the human person where fear and trem¬
bling start. Any examination of inner experience—really
inner experience—would have seemed to Dewey to take the
philosopher too far away from nature in the direction of the
theological. We have to remind ourselves here of the pro¬
vincial and overtheologized atmosphere of the America in
which Dewey started his work, and against which he had
to struggle so hard to establish the validity of a secular in¬
telligence. Given Dewey’s emphasis upon the biological and
sociological contexts as ultimate, however, together with his
interpretation of human thought as basically an effort to
transform the environment, we end with the picture of man
as essentially homo faber, the technological animal. This be¬
lief in technique is still a supreme article of the American
faith. Dewey grew up in a period in which America was
still wrestling with its frontier, and the mood of his writings
is unshaken optimism at the expansion of our technical mas¬
tery over nature. Ultimately, the difference between Dewey
and the Existentialists is the difference between America
and Europe. The philosopher cannot seriously put to him¬
self questions that his civilization has not lived.

That is why we propose to limit the scope of our subject
to Europe and consider Existentialism as a distinctly Eu¬
ropean product of this period: in fact, as the philosophy of
Europe in this century. In the broadest sense of the term,
no doubt, all modem thought has been touched by a
greater existential emphasis than was the philosophy of the
earlier modern period. This is simply the result of the
stepped-up secularization of Western civilization, in the
course of which man has inevitably become more attached
to the promises of this earth than to the goal of a transcend¬
ent realm beyond nature. But while it is important to call
attention at the outset to this broad sense of the word “exis¬
tential,” to carry this meaning through in detail would in¬
evitably dilute the specific substance of Existentialism. It is

THE ADVENT OF EXISTENTIALISM

21

Europe that has been in crisis, and it is European thinkers
who have brought the existential problems to a focal ex¬
pression, who have in fact dared to raise the ultimate ques¬
tions. The significance of this philosophy is another matter,
however, and can hardly be confined to its place of origin.
Its significance is for the world and for this epoch of the
world.

The reader may very well ask why, in view of this
broader existential trend within modem philosophy, Exis¬
tentialism should first have been greeted by professional
philosophers in this country as an eccentric and sensational
kind of tempest in a teapot. We should point out that
Anglo-American philosophy is dominated by an altogether
different and alien mode of thought—variously called ana¬
lytic philosophy, Logical Positivism, or sometimes merely
“scientific philosophy.” No doubt, Positivism has also good
claims to being the philosophy of this time: it takes as its
central fact what is undoubtedly the central fact distin¬
guishing our civilization from all others—science; but it goes
on from this to take science as the ultimate ruler of human
fife, which it never has been and psychologically never can
be. Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the
tiny island of fight composed of what he finds scientifically
“meaningful,” while the whole surrounding area in which
ordinary men live from day to day and have their dealings
with other men is consigned to the outer darkness of the
“meaningless." Positivism has simply accepted the frac¬
tured being of modem man and erected a philosophy to
intensify it. Existentialism, whether successfully or not, has
attempted instead to gather all the elements of human real¬
ity into a total picture of man. Positivist man and Existen¬
tialist man are no doubt offspring of the same parent epoch,
but, somewhat as Cain and Abel were, the brothers are di¬
vided unalterably by temperament and the initial choice
they make of their own being. Of course there is on the
contemporary scene a more powerful claimant to philo¬
sophic mastery than either of them: Marxism. Marxist man
is a creature of technics, a busy and ingenious animal, with

22

IRRATIONAL MAN

secular religious faith in History, of which he is the chosen
collaborator. Like Positivism, Marxism has no philosophical
categories for the unique facts of human personality, and in
the natural course of things manages to collectivize this hu¬
man personality out of existence (except where a single
personality attains power, and then his personal paranoia
plays havoc with the lives of two hundred million people).
Both Marxism and Positivism are, intellectually speaking,
relics of the nineteenth-century Enlightenment that have
not yet come to terms with the shadow side of human life
as grasped even by some of the nineteenth-century thinkers
themselves. The Marxist and Positivist picture of man, con¬
sequently, is thin and oversimplified. Existential philoso¬
phy, as a revolt against such oversimplification, attempts
to grasp the image of the whole man, even where this in¬
volves bringing to consciousness all that is dark and ques¬
tionable in his existence. And in just this respect it is a
much more authentic expression of our own contemporary
experience.

In proof of this we turn now to look at the historical char¬
acteristics of the time that has engendered this philosophy.

THE ENCOUNTER WITH
NOTHINGNESS

Chapter Two

N o a g e has ever been so self-conscious as ours. At any
rate, the quantity of journalism the modem age has turned
out in the process of its own self-analysis already overflows
our archives and, were it not that most of it is doomed to
perish, would be a dull burden to hand down to our de¬
scendants. The task still goes on, as indeed it must, for the
last word has not been spoken, and modem man seems even
further from understanding himself than when he first be¬
gan to question his own identity. Of documentation of ex¬
ternal facts we have had enough and to spare, more than
the squirrellike scholars will ever be able to piece together
into a single whole, enough to keep the busy popularizers
spouting in bright-eyed knowledgeability the rest of then-
days; but of the inner facts—of what goes on at the center
where the forces of our fate first announce themselves—we
are still pretty much in ignorance, and most of the con¬
temporary world is caught up in an unconscious and gigan¬
tic conspiracy to run away from these facts. Hence the ne¬
cessity of returning to a subject that only appears to be
well worn. With civilizations, as with individuals, the outer
fact is often merely the explosion resulting from accumu¬
lated inner tension, the signs of which were plentifully pres¬
ent, though none of the persons concerned chose to heed
them.

24

IRRATIONAL MAN

1. THE DECLINE OF RELIGION

The central fact of modem history in the West—by which
we mean the long period from the end of the Middle Ages
to the present—is unquestionably the decline of religion. No
doubt, the Churches are still very powerful organizations;
there are millions of churchgoers all over the world; and
even the purely intellectual possibilities of religious belief
look better to churchmen now than in the bleak days of
self-confident nineteenth-century materialism. A few years
ago there was even considerable talk about a “religious re¬
vival,” and some popular and patriotic periodicals such as
Life magazine gave a great deal of space to it; but the talk
has by now pretty much died down, the movement, if any,
subsided, and the American public buys more automobiles
and television sets than ever before. When Life magazine
promotes a revival of religion, one is only too painfully
aware from the nature of this publication that religion is
considered as being in the national interest; one could
scarcely have a clearer indication of the broader historical
fact that in the modern world the nation-state, a thoroughly
secular institution, outranks any church.

The decline of religion in modem times means simply
that religion is no longer the uncontested center and ruler
of man’s life, and that the Church is no longer the final and
unquestioned home and asylum of his being. The deepest
significance of this change does not even appear principally
at the purely intellectual level, in loss of belief, though this
loss due to the critical inroads of science has been a major
historical cause of the decline. The waning of religion is a
much more concrete and complex fact than a mere change
in conscious outlook; it penetrates the deepest strata of
man’s total psychic life. It is indeed one of the major stages
in man’s psychic evolution—as Nietzsche, almost alone
among nineteenth-century philosophers, was to see. Reli¬
gion to medieval man was not so much a theological system
as a solid psychological matrix surrounding the individual’s
life from birth to death, sanctifying and enclosing all its or-

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NOTHINGNESS 25

dinary and extraordinary occasions in sacrament and ritual.
The loss of the Church was the loss of a whole system of
symbols, images, dogmas, and rites which had the psycho¬
logical validity of immediate experience, and within which
hitherto the whole psychic life of Western man had been
safely contained. In losing religion, man lost the concrete
connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set
free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity. But
he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no
longer answered the needs of his spirit. A home is the ac¬
cepted framework which habitually contains our life. To
lose one’s psychic container is to be cast adrift, to become
a wanderer upon the face of the earth. Henceforth, in seek¬
ing his own human completeness man would have to do for
himself what he once had done for him, unconsciously, by
the Church, through the medium of its sacramental life.
Naturally enough, man’s feeling of homelessness did not
make itself felt for some time; the Renaissance man was still
enthralled by a new and powerful vision of mastery over
the whole earth.

No believer, no matter how sincere, could possibly write
the Divine Comedy today, even if he possessed a talent
equal to Dante’s. Visions and symbols do not have the im¬
mediate and overwhelming reality for us that they had for
the medieval poet. In the Divine Comedy the whole of na¬
ture is merely a canvas upon which the religious symbol
and image are painted. Western man has spent more than
five hundred years—half a millennium—in stripping nature
of these projections and turning it into a realm of neutral
objects which his science may control. Thus it could hardly
be expected that the religious image would have the same
force for us as it did for Dante. This is simply a psychic
fact within human history; psychic facts have just as much
historical validity as the facts that we now, unlike the man
of Dante’s time, travel in airplanes and work in factories
regulated by computing machines. A great work of art can
never be repeated—the history of art shows us time and
again that literal imitation leads to pastiche—because it
springs from the human soul, which evolves like everything

26

IRRATIONAL MAN

else in nature. This point must be insisted upon, contrary
to the view of some of our more enthusiastic medievalists
who picture the psychic containment of medieval man as a
situation of human completeness to which we must return.
History has never allowed man to return to the past in any
total sense. And our psychological problems cannot be
solved by a regression to a past state in which they had
not yet been brought into being. On the other hand, en¬
lightened and progressive thinkers are equally blind when
they fail to recognize that every major step forward by
mankind entails some loss, the sacrifice of an older security
and the creation and heightening of new tensions. (We
should bear this in mind against some of the criticisms of
Existentialism as a philosophy that has unbearably height¬
ened human tensions: it did not create those tensions, which
were already at work in the soul of modem man, but simply
sought to give them philosophic expression, rather than
evading them by pretending they were not there.)

It is far from true that the passage from the Middle Ages
to modem times is the substitution of a rational for a reli¬
gious outlook; on the contrary, the whole of medieval phi¬
losophy—as Whitehead has very aptiy remarked—is one
of “unbounded rationalism” in comparison with modem
thought. Certainly, the difference between a St. Thomas
Aquinas in the thirteenth century and a Kant at the end of
the eighteenth century is conclusive on this point: For Aqui¬
nas the whole natural world, and particularly this natural
world as it opens toward God as First Cause, was transpar¬
ently accessible to human reason; while to Kant, writing at
the bitter end of the century of Enli gh tenment, the limits
of human reason had very radically shrunk. (Indeed, as we
shall see later, the very meaning of human reason became
altered in Kant.) But this “unbounded rationalism” of the
medieval philosopher is altogether different from the un-
trammeled use later thinkers made of human reason, apply¬
ing it like an acid solvent to all things human or divine.
The rationalism of the medieval philosophers was contained
by the mysteries of faith and dogma, which were altogether
beyond the grasp of human reason, but were nevertheless

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NOTHINGNESS 27

powerfully real and meaningful to man as symbols that
kept the vital circuit open between reason and emotion, be¬
tween the rational and non-rational in the human psyche.
Hence, this rationalism of the medieval philosophers does
not end with the attenuated, bleak, or grim picture of man
we find in the modem rationalists. Here, once again, the
condition under which the philosopher creates his philoso¬
phy, like that under which the poet creates his poetry, has
to do with deeper levels of his being—deeper than the
merely conscious level of having or not having a rational
point of view. We could not expect to produce a St. Thomas
Aquinas, any more than a Dante, today. The total psychic
condition of man—of which after all thinking is one of the
manifestations—has evolved too radically. Which may be
why present-day Thomists have on the whole remained sin¬
gularly unconvincing to their contemporaries.

At the gateway that leads from the Middle Ages into the
modem world stand Science (which later became the spirit
of the Enlightenment), Protestantism, and Capitalism. At
first glance, the spirit of Protestantism would seem to have
very little to do with that of the New Science, since in mat¬
ters religious Protestantism placed all the weight of its em¬
phasis upon the irrational datum of faith, as against the im¬
posing rational structures of medieval theology, and there
is Luther’s famous curse upon “the whore, Reason.” In
secular matters, however—and particularly in its relation to¬
ward nature—Protestantism fitted in very well with the New
Science. By stripping away the wealth of images and sym¬
bols from medieval Christianity, Protestantism unveiled na¬
ture as a realm of objects hostile to the spirit and to be
conquered by puritan zeal and industry. Thus Protestant¬
ism, like science, helped carry forward that immense proj¬
ect of modem man: the despiritualization of nature, the
emptying of it of all the symbolic images projected upon it
by the human psyche. With Protestantism begins that long
modem struggle, which reaches its culmination in the twen¬
tieth century, to strip man naked. To be sure, in all of this
the aim was progress, and Protestantism did succeed in rais¬
ing the religious consciousness to a higher level of individual

IRRATIONAL MAN

28

sincerity, soul-searching, and strenuous inwardness. Man
was impoverished in order to come face to face with his
God and the severe and inexplicable demands of his faith;
but in the process he was stripped of all the mediating rites
and dogmas that could make this confrontation less dan¬
gerous to his psychic balance. Protestantism achieved a
heightening of the religious consciousness, but at the same
time severed this consciousness from the deep unconscious
life of our total human nature. In this respect, its historical
thrust runs parallel to that of the New Science and capital¬
ism, since science was making the mythical and symbolic
picture of nature disappear before the success of its own
rational explanations, and capitalism was opening up the
whole world as a field of operations for rationally planned
enterprise.

Faith, for Protestantism, is nevertheless the irrational and
numinous center of religion; Luther was saturated with the
feeling of St. Paul that man of himself can do nothing and
only God working in us can bring salvation. Here the infla¬
tion of human consciousness is radically denied, and the
conscious mind is recognized as the mere instrument and
plaything of a much greater unconscious force. Faith is an
abyss that engulfs the rational nature of man. The Protes¬
tant doctrine of Original Sin is in all its severity a kind of
compensatory recognition of those depths below the level
of consciousness where the earnest soul demands to inter¬
rogate itself—except that those depths are cast into the outer
darkness of depravity. So long as faith retained its intensity,
however, the irrational elements of human nature were ac¬
corded recognition and a central place in the total human
economy. But as the modem world moves onward, it be¬
comes more and more secularized in every department of
life; faith consequently becomes attenuated, and Protestant
man begins to look more and more like a gaunt skeleton, a
sculpture by Giacometti. A secular civilization leaves him
more starkly naked than the iconoclasm of the Reformation
had ever dreamed. The more severely he struggles to hold
on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more
tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NOTHINGNESS 2Q

Himself threatens to become a relation to Nothingness. In
this sense Kierkegaard, in the middle of the nineteenth cen¬
tury, was the reckoning point of the whole Protestant Ref¬
ormation that began three centuries earlier: He sees faith
for the uncompromising and desperate wager it is, if one
takes it in all its Protestant strictness; and he cannot say,
like his Catholic counterpart Pascal, “Stupefy yourself, take
holy water, receive the sacraments, and in the end all shall
be well”—for Protestant man has forsworn the sacraments
and natural symbols of the soul as the snares and pomp of
the devil. Some of Kierkegaard’s books, such as The Sick¬
ness Unto Death and The Concept of Dread, are still fright¬
ening to our contemporaries and so are excused or merely
passed over as the personal outpourings of a very melan¬
choly temperament; yet they are the truthful record of
what the Protestant soul must experience on the brink of
the great Void. Protestant man is the beginning of the
West’s fateful encounter with Nothingness—an encounter
that was long overdue and is perhaps only now in the twen¬
tieth century reaching its culmination.

2. THE RATIONAL ORDERING OF
SOCIETY

Naturally, none of this was perceived at its beginning. In
human history, as in the individual human life, the signifi¬
cance of the small beginnings is perceived at last only in
their end. In its secular ethic, Protestantism was much in
accord with the spirit of capitalism, as modem historians
have repeatedly shown. For several centuries the two went
hand in hand, ravaging and rebuilding the globe, conquer¬
ing new continents and territories, and in general seeming
triumphantly to prove that this earth is itself the promised
land where zeal and industry really pay off. Even in the
midst of the nineteenth century, when capitalism had also
succeeded in erecting the worst slums in human history, the
Englishman Macaulay could comment smugly upon the
fact that the Protestant nations are the most energetic and

30

IRRATIONAL, MAN

prosperous and suggest that this may very well be a sign of
the superiority of their religion. The great German sociolo¬
gist, Max Weber, has provided one of the chief keys to the
whole of modem history by describing its central process
as the ever-increasing rational organization of human life.
It is in this light too that the historical rise of capitalism
must be understood: the capitalist emerges from feudal so¬
ciety as the enterprising and calculating mind who must
organize production rationally to show a favorable balance
of profits over costs. Where feudalism is concrete and or¬
ganic, with man dominated by the image of the land, capi¬
talism is abstract and calculating in spirit, and severs man
from the earth. In capitalism, everything follows from this
necessity of rationally organizing economic enterprise in the
interests of efficiency: the collectivization of labor in fac¬
tories and the consequent subdivision of human function;
the accumulation of masses of the population in cities, with
the inevitable increase in the technical control of life that
this makes necessary; and the attempt rationally to control
public demand by elaborate and fantastic advertising, mass
pressure, and even planned sociological research. The proc¬
ess of rationalizing economic enterprise thus knows no limits
and comes to cover the whole of society’s life. That capi¬
talism has given way in our time, over large areas of the
earth, to a form of total collectivization that has been taken
over by the State does not alter the fundamental human
issues involved. The collectivization becomes all the more
drastic when a mystique of the State, backed by brutal regi¬
mentation by the police, is added to it. Collectivized man,
whether communist or capitalist, is still only an abstract
fragment of man.

We are so used to the fact that we forget it or fail to
perceive that the man of the present day fives on a level of
abstraction altogether beyond the man of the past. When
the contemporary man in the street with only an ordinary
education quickly solves an elementary problem in arithme¬
tic, he is doing some thin g which for a medieval mathema¬
tician—an expert—would have required horns. No doubt,
the medieval man would have produced along with his cal-

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NOTHINGNESS 31

culation a rigorous proof of the whole process; it does not
matter that the modem man does not know what he is do¬
ing, so long as he can manipulate abstractions easily and
efficiently. The ordinary man today answers complicated
questionnaires, fills out tax forms, performs elaborate cal¬
culations, which the medieval man was never called upon
to do—and all this merely in the normal routine of being a
responsible citizen within a mass society. Every step for¬
ward in mechanical technique is a step in the direction of
abstraction. This capacity for living easily and familiarly
at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of
modem man’s power. With it he has transformed the
planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world’s popula¬
tion. But it is also a power which has, like everything hu¬
man, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootless¬
ness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails
modem man in his moments of real anxiety.

The sheer economic power of modem society is attended
by the same human ambiguities. The rational ordering of
production makes possible a material level of prosperity be¬
yond anything known by the past. Not only can the mate¬
rial wants of the masses be satisfied to a degree greater
than ever before, but technology is fertile enough to gener¬
ate new wants that it can also satisfy. Automobiles, radio,
and now television become actual needs for great numbers
of people. All of this makes for an extraordinary externali-
zation of life in our time. The tempo of living is heightened,
but a greed for novelties sets in. The machinery of com¬
munication makes possible the almost instantaneous con¬
veying of news from one point on the globe to another. Peo¬
ple read three or four editions of a daily paper, hear the
news on the radio, or see tomorrow morning’s news on their
television screen at night. Journalism has become a great
god of the period, and gods have a way of ruthlessly and
demonically taking over their servitors. In thus becoming a
state of mind—as Kierkegaard prophesied it would do, writ¬
ing with amazing clairvoyance more than a century ago—
journalism enables people to deal with life more and
more at second hand. Information usually consists of half-

32

IRRATIONAL MAN

truths, and “knowledgeability” becomes a substitute for
real knowledge. Moreover, popular journalism has by now
extended its operations into what were previously consid¬
ered the strongholds of culture—religion, art, philosophy.
Everyman walks around with a pocket digest of culture in
his head. The more competent and streamlined journalism
becomes, the greater its threat to the public mind—particu¬
larly in a country like the United States. It becomes more
and more difficult to distinguish the secondhand from the
real thing, until most people end by forgetting there is such
a distinction. The very success of technique engenders a
whole style of life for the period, which subsists purely on
externals. What lies behind those externals—the human per¬
son, in its uniqueness and its totality—dwindles to a shadow
and a ghost.

In his Man in the Modern Age Karl Jaspers has diagnosed
all these depersonalizing forces within modem society so
completely that they hardly need pointing out here. Jaspers
sees the historical meaning of existential philosophy as a
struggle to awaken in the individual the possibilities of an
authentic and genuine life, in the face of the great modem
drift toward a standardized mass society. Jaspers wrote his
book in 1930, three years before Hitler came to power and
precisely at the end of a postwar decade in Germany of
great intellectual brilliance and greater economic bank¬
ruptcy under the Weimar Republic. The book is thus satu¬
rated from beginning to end with the dual feeling of the
great threat and the great promise of modem life. Jaspers
was one of that generation of Europeans for whom the out¬
break of the First World War, coming in the first years of
their mature life, marked a turning point in their whole way
of looking at Europe and its civilization. August 1914 is
the axial date in modem Western history, and once past it
we are directly confronted with the present-day world. The
sense of power over the material universe with which mod¬
em man emerged, as we have seen, from the Middle Ages,
changed on that date into its opposite: a sense of weakness
and dereliction before the whirlwind that man is able to
unleash but not to control. That feeling of danger has per-

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NOTHINGNESS 33

sisted and grown stronger, and our generation knows it as
an uncanny awareness of the explosive quality of man’s
secular powers—and now, alas, with the possession of
atomic weapons, the word must be taken literally. This
awareness is a far cry from that sense of intoxication and
power with which the Renaissance and the Enlightenment
sought to banish the darkness of the Middle Ages and to
turn their energies confidently to the conquest of nature; a
far cry from early Protestantism’s conviction of the sincerity
of its own conscience and the absolute value of its secular
ethic; a far cry from the sense of triumph with which capi¬
talism pointed to the material prosperity of bourgeois civi¬
lization as its justification and end. Jaspers is a Protestant
who sees in Protestantism no final resolution for the tensions
of the human soul; a bourgeois who has lived through a
period in which all the stable fabric and norms of bour¬
geois life have been dissolved; and a man of the Enlighten¬
ment, a professor, who philosophizes in order to illumine
human existence, but who sees this illumination as a tiny
and flickering light set against the encompassing darkness
of the forces of night.

The First World War was the beginning of the end of
the bourgeois civilization of Europe. Of course, ends often
take long in being accomplished, and capitalism is still
hanging on by the skin of its teeth in the Western countries.
Our point here, however, has to do not with the mere eco¬
nomic organization of society, but with the concrete and
total fact of the civilization itself, with all its values and
attitudes, unspoken and spoken. It would be superficial to
take the outbreak of that war, as Marxists do, as signifying
merely the bankruptcy of capitalism, its inability to func¬
tion further without crisis and bloodshed. August 1914 was
a much more total human debacle than that, and the words
that catch it are those of the novelist Henry James, exclaim¬
ing with shocked horror, “To have to take it all now for
what the treacherous years were all the while making for
and meaning is too tragic for any words.” As an American,
James had experienced to the full the enchantment and re¬
finement of European civilization; it had been a central

34

IRRATIONAL MAN

theme in nearly all his writing, and here in this momentary
outburst there rises to his mind the awful vision of all Eu¬
rope’s elegance and beauty being mere gaudy decoration
over the face of a human abyss. August 1914 was a debacle
for European man as a whole and not merely for the wicked
conspiracy of financiers, militarists, and politicians. The pe¬
riod from 1870 to 1914 has been aptly described by one
historian as the generation of materialism: the principal
countries of Europe had become unified as nations, prosper¬
ity was in the air, and the bourgeois contemplated with
self-satisfaction an epoch of vast material progress and po¬
litical stability. August 1914 shattered the foundations of
that human world. It revealed that the apparent stability,
security, and material progress of society had rested, like
everything human, upon the void. European man came
face to face with himself as a stranger. When he ceased to
be contained and sheltered within a stable social and politi¬
cal environment, he saw that his rational and enlightened
philosophy could no longer console him with the assurance
that it satisfactorily answered the question What is man?

Existential philosophy (like much of modem art) is thus
a product of bourgeois society in a state of dissolution.
Marxists have labored this point but without really under¬
standing it; nevertheless, it remains true. The dissolution is
a fact, but neither Existentialism nor modem art produced
it. Nor is “dissolution” synonymous with “decadence.” A so¬
ciety coming apart at top and bottom, or passing over into
another form, contains just as many possibilities for revela¬
tion as a society running along smoothly in its own rut. The
individual is thrust out of the sheltered nest that society
has provided. He can no longer hide his nakedness by the
old disguises. He learns how much of what he has taken
for granted was by its own nature neither eternal nor nec¬
essary but thoroughly temporal and contingent. He learns
that the solitude of the self is an irreducible dimension of
human life no matter how completely that self had seemed
to be contained in its social milieu. In the end, he sees each
man as solitary and unsheltered before his own death. Ad¬
mittedly, these are painful truths, but the most basic things

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NOTHINGNESS 35

are always learned with pain, since our inertia and com¬
placent love of comfort prevent us from learning them until
they are forced upon us. It appears that man is willing to
learn about himself only after some disaster; after war, eco¬
nomic crisis, and political upheaval have taught him how
flimsy is that human world in which he thought himself so
securely grounded. What he learns has always been there,
lying concealed beneath the surface of even the best¬
functioning societies; it is no less true for having come out
of a period of chaos and disaster. But so long as man does
not have to face up to such a truth, he will not do so.

Thus with the modem period, man—to recapitulate—has
entered upon a secular phase of his history. He entered it
with exuberance over the prospect of increased power he
would have over the world around him. But in this world,
in which his dreams of power were often more than ful¬
filled, he found himself for the first time homeless. Science
stripped nature of its human forms and presented man with
a universe that was neutral, alien, in its vastness and force,
to his human purposes. Religion, before this phase set in,
had been a structure that encompassed man’s life, provid¬
ing him with a system of images and symbols by which he
could express his own aspirations toward psychic whole¬
ness. With the loss of this containing framework man be¬
came not only a dispossessed but a fragmentary being.

In society, as in the spiritual world, secular goals have
come to predominate; the rational organization of the econ¬
omy has increased human power over nature, and politi¬
cally also society has become more rational, utilitarian,
democratic, with a resulting material wealth and progress.
The men of the Enlightenment foresaw no end to this trium¬
phant expansion of reason into all the areas of social life.
But here too reason has foundered upon its opposite, upon
the surd and unpredictable realities—wars, economic crises
and dislocations, political upheavals among the masses.
Moreover, man’s feeling of homelessness, of alienation has
been intensified in the midst of a bureaucratized, imper¬
sonal mass society. He has come to feel himself an outsider

36

IRRATIONAL MAN

even within his own human society. He is trebly alienated:
a stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social ap¬
paratus that supplies his material wants.

But the worst and final form of alienation, toward which
indeed the others tend, is man’s alienation from his own
self. In a society that requires of man only that he perform
competently his own particular social function, man be¬
comes identified with this function, and the rest of his be¬
ing is allowed to subsist as best it can—usually to be
dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten.

3 . SCIENCE AND FINITUDE

The foregoing, all matters of historical fact, have also be¬
come the themes of existential philosophy. This philosophy
embodies the self-questioning of the time, seeking to reori¬
ent itself to its own historical destiny. Indeed, the whole
problematic of Existentialism unfolds from this historical
situation. Alienation and estrangement; a sense of the basic
fragility and contingency of human fife; the impotence of
reason confronted with the depths of existence; the threat
of Nothingness, and the solitary and unsheltered condition
of the individual before this threat. One can scarcely sub¬
ordinate these problems logically one to another; each
participates in all the others, and they all circulate around
a common center. A single atmosphere pervades them all
like a chilly wind: the radical feeling of human finitude.
The limitless horizons into which man looked at the time
of the Renaissance have at last contracted. Oddly enough,
man’s discovery that he himself is finite through and
through—is so, one might say, from the inside out—comes
at a time when there seem no longer to be any limits to his
technological conquest of nature. But the truth about man
is never to be found in one quality that opposes another,
but in both qualities at once; and so his weakness is only
one side of the coin, his power the other. A recognition of
limits, of boundaries, may be the only thing that prevents
power from dizzy collapse.

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NOTHINGNESS 37

But, it might be argued, what makes Western civiliza¬
tion unique is its possession of science, and in science we
find uniform and continuous progress without limits. Re¬
search goes on, its results are rich and positive, and these
are brought together in ever wider and more inclusive sys¬
tems. There would seem, in this process, to be no contract¬
ing of horizons either in fact or in possibility. In a certain
sense this is true, and yet science in the twentieth century
has come up with answers which make the ambitions of
rationalism seem overweening, and which themselves sug¬
gest that man must redefine his traditional concept of rea¬
son. It would be unlikely if this were otherwise, for scien¬
tists too are men and therefore participate in the collective
psyche as well as help fashion it. Religion, social forms,
science, and art are modes in which man exists; and the
more we come to recognize the temporal being of man the
more we must recognize a unity within and behind all these
modes in which that temporal existence finds its expression.

Science too—and within its own authentic sphere—has
come up against the fact of human finitude. That this has
happened within science itself, and not in the philosophiz¬
ing about science, makes the discovery more authentic and
momentous. The anthropological sciences, and particularly
modem depth psychology, have shown us that human rea¬
son is the long historical fabrication of a creature, man,
whose psychic roots still extend downward into the prime¬
val soil. These discoveries of the irrational, however, he out¬
side reason itself; they are stubborn obstacles to the use of
reason in our fives, but obstacles which the confirmed ra¬
tionalist might still hope to circumvent by a cleverer use of
that very tool, reason. The more decisive limitations are
those that have shown up within the workings of reason,
in the more rigorous sciences of physics and mathemat¬
ics. The most advanced of Western sciences, physics and
mathematics, have in our time become paradoxical: that
is, they have arrived at the state where they breed para¬
doxes for reason itself. More than a hundred and fifty years
ago the philosopher Kant attempted to show that there
were ineluctable limits to reason; but the Western mind,

3§

IRRATIONAL MAN

positivistic to the core, could be expected to take such a
conclusion seriously only when it showed up in the findings
of science. Science has in this century, with the discoveries
of Heisenberg in physics, and Godel in mathematics, at last
caught up with Kant.

Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy shows that there
are essential limits to our ability to know and predict physi¬
cal states of affairs, and opens up to us a glimpse of a nature
that may at bottom be irrational and chaotic—at any rate,
our knowledge of it is limited so that we cannot know this
not to be the case. This finding marks an end to the old
dream of physicists who, motivated by a thoroughly ra¬
tional prejudice, thought that reality must be predictable
through and through. The figure of the Laplacian Demon
was a very striking symbol of this: Imagine, says Laplace,
a Being who knows the position and momentum of every
particle in the universe, together with the laws of motion
governing such particles; such a Being would be able to
predict all subsequent states of the universe. Physicists can
no longer operate on such cryptotheological faiths, but must
take their predictability only where and to the extent that
it exhibits itself in experience.

The situation in physics is made more paradoxical by
Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity, according to which
the electron must be regarded both as a wave and as a
particle, according to its context. The application of these
contradictory designations would have seemed thoroughly
illogical to a nineteenth-century physicist. Indeed, some
physicists have suggested a new form of logic, from which
the classic law of the Excluded Middle (either A or not A)
would be dropped; and when new forms of logic are being
constructed, one can only conclude that the nature of what
is and what is not rational stands open to doubt. In prac¬
tice, the Principle of Complementarity sets a rigorous limit
upon the observations of physics: As one physicist, Von
Pauli, puts it, “I can choose to observe one experimental
set-up, A, and ruin B, or choose to observe B and ruin A.
I cannot choose not to ruin one of them.” Here the language
is perfectly appropriate to the pathos of knowledge in ev-

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NOTHINGNESS

39

ery area in life: we know one thing at the cost of not know¬
ing something else, and it is simply not the case that we
can choose to know everything at once. What is remarkable
is that here, at the very farthest reaches of precise experi¬
mentation, in the most rigorous of the natural sciences, the
ordinary and banal fact of our human limitations emerges.

Godel’s findings seem to have even more far-reaching con¬
sequences, when one considers that in the Western tradi¬
tion, from the Pythagoreans and Plato onward, mathemat¬
ics as the very model of intelligibility has been the central
citadel of rationalism. Now it turns out that even in his
most precise science—in the province where his reason had
seemed omnipotent—man cannot escape his essential fini-
tude: every system of mathematics that he constructs is
doomed to incompleteness. Godel has shown that mathe¬
matics contains insoluble problems, and hence can never be
formalized in any complete system. This means, in other
words, that mathematics can never be turned over to a giant
computing machine; it will always be unfinished, and
therefore mathematicians—the human beings who construct
mathematics—will always be in business. The human ele¬
ment here rises above the machine: mathematics is unfin¬
ished as is any human life.

But since mathematics can never be completed, it might
be argued that Godel’s finding shows us that there are no
limits to mathematical knowledge. True, in one sense; but
in another sense it sets a more drastic limitation upon math¬
ematical knowledge, since mathematicians now know they
can never, formally speaking, reach rock bottom; in fact,
there is no rock bottom, since mathematics has no self-
subsistent reality independent of the human activity that
mathematicians carry on. And if human reason can never
reach rock bottom (complete systematization) in mathe¬
matics, it is not likely to reach it anywhere else. There is
no System possible for human existence, Kierkegaard said
a century ago, differing with Hegel, who wished to enclose
reality within a completely rational structure; the System is
impossible for mathematics, Godel tells us today. In prac¬
tice, the fact that there is no rock bottom means that the

40

IRRATIONAL MAN

mathematician can never prove the consistency of mathe¬
matics except by using means that are shakier than the sys¬
tem he is trying to prove consistent. Mathematics thus
cannot escape finally the uncertainty that attaches to any
human enterprise.

The situation is all the more vexing since mathematicians
in the last half century have come up with some very trou¬
blesome paradoxes. Mathematics is like a ship in mid-ocean
that has sprung certain leaks (paradoxes); the leaks have
been temporarily plugged, but our reason can never guar¬
antee that the ship will not spring others. This human in¬
security in what had been the most secure of the disciplines
of rationality marks a new turn in Western thinking. When
the mathematician Hermann Weyl exclaims, “We have
tried to storm Heaven, and we have only succeeded in pil¬
ing up the tower of Babel,” he is giving passionate expres¬
sion to the collapse of human hubris; and we can be sure
that mathematics has at last been returned to its rightful
status as an activity or mode of being of finite man.

The concurrence of these various discoveries in time is
extraordinary. Heidegger published his Being and Time, a
somber and rigorous meditation on human finitude, in 1927.
In the same year Heisenberg gave to the world his Principle
of Indeterminacy. In 1929 the mathematician Skolem pub¬
lished a theorem which some mathematicians now think al¬
most as remarkable as Godel’s: that even the elementary
number system cannot be categorically formalized. In 1931
appeared Godel’s epoch-making discovery. When events
run parallel this way, when they occur so close together in
time, but independently of each other and in diverse fields,
we are tempted to conclude that they are not mere “mean¬
ingless” coincidences but very meaningful symptoms. The
whole mind of the time seems to be inclining in one di¬
rection.

What emerges from these separate strands of history is
an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more
nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contrac¬
tion of man’s horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping
down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the

THE ENCOUNTER WITH NOTHINGNESS 41

center of all his horizons. The labor of modem culture,
wherever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denuda¬
tion. A return to the sources; “to the things themselves,” as
Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away
of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms—these are
some of the slogans under which this phase in history has
presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping
down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolu¬
tionary or even “negative”: a being who has become thor¬
oughly questionable to himself must also find questionable
his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.

This apparent “coincidence” of historical forces becomes
even more remarkable and meaningful when we consider
modem art. What man has experienced historically with
the changes in religion, in social and economic forms, and
now in modem science as well—all of this experience is re¬
vealed to us, in a more striking and more human way,
through art. Art is the collective dream of a period, a dream
in which, if we have eyes to see, we can trace the physiog¬
nomy of the time most clearly. A brief glance at modem
art may serve to make plain that the spiritual features of
modernity which we have been anatomizing in this chapter
have not been bare and empty abstractions, but a living
human drama in which we have all been deeply involved,
but which the artist has the clearest eyes to see.

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN
ART

Chapter Three

Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart
w. B. YEATS

Anyone who attempts to gain a unified understanding of
modem art as a whole is bound to suffer the uncomfortable
sensation of having fallen into a thicket of brambles. We
ourselves are involved in the subject, and we can hardly
achieve the detachment of the historian a few centuries
hence. Modem art still provokes violent controversy, even
after it has been on the scene a good half century and names
like Picasso and Joyce have become almost household
words. The Philistine still finds it shocking, scandalous, and
foolish; and there is always a case to be made for the
Philistine, and surely for the Philistine in ourselves without
whom we could not carry on the drab business of ordinary
living. Indeed, from the point of view we are taking here,
the Philistine attitude, particularly in its irritation, may be
just as revelatory historically as any other. But it is a case
not only of the Philistine; sensitive observers still exist—di¬
rectors of museums, connoisseurs, and historians—who find
in modern art a disastrous falling away from the excellence
of the art of the past. In a sense, all this controversy is
pointless; so much of it has to do with the eventual his-

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART

43

torical rating of our own period, which is something we can¬
not even foresee. The century from Manet to Matisse may
figure in future art histories as a period of impoverishment
and decline, whose works cannot stand beside those of the
old masters; or it may figure as a period of such abundant
creativity that it can be matched only by the Renaissance
during the fifteenth century. My own personal prejudice is
toward the latter j'udgment, but I have no way of proving
it; and such speculation, in any case, does not enter into
my own experience of this art. We have simply got to give
up the attempt to assess ourselves for posterity; the men
of the future will form their own opinions without our help.
What we so self-consciously call “modem art,” after all, is
nothing more nor less than the art of this time, our art;
there is no other today. If we could have a different art,
or a better, we would have it. As it is, we are lucky in this
period to have any art at all. The Philistine rebukes the
artist for being willful, as if all of modem art were a de¬
liberate conspiracy against him, the viewer; the artist can
hardly hope to make this man understand that art is not a
mere matter of conscious will and conscious contrivance,
and that the artist, by changing his ideas (even by adopt¬
ing the Philistine’s), will not become a different person
living at a different time and place. In the end the only
authentic art is that which has about it the power of in¬
evitability.

Nevertheless, the controversy, irritation, and bafflement
to which modem art gives rise does provide us a very ef¬
fective handle with which to take hold of it. Irritation usu¬
ally arises when some thin g touches a sore spot in ourselves,
which most of the time we would like desperately to hide;
rarely if ever does the fault lie totally with the provoking
object. Modem art touches a sore spot, or several sore spots,
in the ordinary citizen of which he is totally unaware. The
more irritated he becomes at modem art the more he be¬
trays the fact that he himself, and his civilization, are im¬
plicated in what the artist shows him. The ordinary citizen
objects to modem art because it is difficult and obscure.
Is it so certain that the world the ordinary citizen takes for

44

IRRATIONAL MAN

granted, the values upon which his civilization rests are so
clear, either to him or in themselves? Sometimes the artist’s
image is very clear (in general, modem art is simpler than
academic art), but it goes against the grain of the ordinary
man because secretly he understands its intent all too well;
and besides, he has already limited “understanding” to the
habitual pigeonholes into which he slips every experience.
The ordinary man is uncomfortable, angry, or derisive be¬
fore the dislocation of forms in modem art, before its
bold distortions, or arbitrary manipulations of objects. The
painter puts three or more eyes in the face, or several noses,
or twists and elongates the body at the expense of photo¬
graphic resemblance in order to build up his own inner
image. Has the contrary attitude of strict and literal attach¬
ment to objects succeeded in resolving all the anxieties of
the ordinary man, and has not in fact the rampant extro¬
version of modem civilization brought it to the brink of the
abyss? Finally, the ordinary man—and in this respect the
ordinary man is joined by the learned and sensitive tradi¬
tionalist in art—objects to the content of modem art: it is
too bare and bleak, too negative or “nihilistic,” too shock¬
ing or scandalous; it dishes out unpalatable truths. But
have the traditional ideals worked so well in this century
that we can afford to neglect the unpalatable truths about
human life that those ideals have chosen to ignore? Does
the aesthete who extols the greatness of the past as an argu¬
ment against modem art have any idea of how pallid his
own response to, say, the Virgin of Chartres appears beside
the medieval man’s response? Or that his own aestheticism,
however cultured, is in fact a form of sentimentality—since
sentimentality, at bottom, is nothing but false feeling, feel¬
ing that is untrue to its object, whether by being excessive
or watered down?

In a famous passage in A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hem¬
ingway writes:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious,

and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard

them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of ear-

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART 45

shot, so that only the shouted words came through, and
had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up
by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long
time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that
were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like
the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the
meat except to bury it. There were many words that you
could not stand to hear and finally only the names of
places had dignity, Certain numbers were the same way
and certain dates and these with the names of places
were all you could say and have them mean anything.
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow
were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the
numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of
regiments and the dates.

For a whole generation that was the great statement of pro¬
test against the butchery of the First World War. But it
has a greater historical significance than that: it can be
taken as a kind of manifesto of modem art and literature,
an incitement to break through empty abstractions of what¬
ever kind, to destroy sentimentality even if the real feel¬
ings exposed should appear humble and impoverished—the
names of places and dates; and even if in stripping himself
naked the artist seems to be left with Nothing. Modem art
thus begins, and sometimes ends, as a confession of spirit¬
ual poverty. That is its greatness and its triumph, but also
the needle it jabs into the Philistine’s sore spot, for the last
thing he wants to be reminded of is his spiritual poverty.
In fact, his greatest poverty is not to know how impover¬
ished he is, and so long as he mouths the empty ideals or
religious phrases of the past he is but as tinkling brass. In
matters of the spirit, poverty and riches are sometimes
closer than identical twins: the man who struts with bor¬
rowed feathers may be poor as a church mouse within,
while a work that seems stark and bleak can, if genuine,
speak with all the inexhaustible richness of the world. The
triumph of Hemingway’s style is its ability to break through
abstractions to see what it is one really senses and feels.

IRRATIONAL MAN

46

When the modem sculptor disdains the pomp of marble
and uses industrial materials, steel wire, or bolts, or even
rejected materials like old board, rope, or nails, he is per¬
haps showing himself to be impoverished next to the heroic
grandeur of a Michelangelo, but he is also bringing us back
to the inexhaustible brute world that surrounds us. Some¬
times the confession of poverty takes a violent and aggres¬
sive tone, as when the Dadaists drew a mustache on the
Mona Lisa. Dada itself, like Hemingway, came out of the
revolt against the First World War, and despite its clown¬
ing must now be regarded as one of the valid eruptions of
the irrational in this century. The generation of the First
World War could hardly be expected to view Western cul¬
ture as sacrosanct, since they perceived—and rightly—that
it was bound up with the civilization that had ended in
that ghastly butchery. Better then to reject the trappings
of that culture, even art itself, if that would leave one a
little more honest in one’s nakedness. To discover one’s own
spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the
spirit.

Modem art has been an immense movement toward the
destruction of forms—of received and traditional forms. The
positive side of this has been an immense expansion of the
possibilities of art and an almost greedy acquisition of new
forms from all over the globe. Around 1900 French painters
became interested in African sculpture. (The introduction
of Japanese prints into Europe in the nineteenth century
had already brought with it a profound shift in the sensi¬
bility of Western painters.) And these borrowings were
only the beginning: by now we have become accustomed
to painters and sculptors drawing their forms from Oriental
and primitive art of every culture. This century in art,
Andr6 Malraux has said, will go down in history not as the
period of abstract art but as the period in which all the art
of the past, and from every quarter of the globe, became
available to the painter and sculptor, and through them be¬
came a part of our modem taste. Certainly, we can no
longer look upon the canon of Western art—Greco-Roman
art as revived, extended, and graced by the Renaissance—

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART 47

as the tradition in art, or even any longer as distinctly and
uniquely ours. That canon is in fact only one tradition
among many, and indeed in its strict adherence to repre¬
sentational form is rather the exception in the whole gallery
of human art. Such an extension of the resources of the past,
for the modern artist, implies a different and more compre¬
hensive understanding of the term “human” itself: a Sume¬
rian figure of a fertility goddess is as “human” to us as a
Greek Aphrodite. When the sensibility of an age can ac¬
commodate the alien “inhuman” forms of primitive art side
by side with the classic “human” figures of Greece or the
Renaissance, it should be obvious that the attitude toward
man that we call classical humanism—which is the intel¬
lectual expression of the spirit that informs the classical
canon of Western art—has also gone by the boards. This is
an historical fact the most immediate evidence of which is
the whole body of modem art itself. Even if existential phi¬
losophy had not been formulated, we would know from
modem art that a new and radical conception of man was
at work in this period.

It would be a mistake to construe this breaking out on
the part of Western artists from the confinement of what
had been their tradition as mere expansion or a spiritually
imperialistic act of acquisition. It is not simply an external
and quantitative change in the number of forms the artist
can assimilate, it is also, and more profoundly, an internal
and qualitative change in the spirit with which the artist
appropriates these forms. This breaking out of the tradition
is in fact also a breakdown within the Western tradition.
On this point the artistic conservative who rejects modern
art, seeing it as a scandal and a departure from the tradi¬
tion, sees rightly, however he may turn what he sees to
his own purposes. That Western painters and sculptors have
in this century gone outside their own tradition to nourish
themselves on the art of the rest of the world—Oriental,
African, Melanesian—signifies that what we have known as
the tradition is no longer able to nourish its most creative
members: the confining mold of this tradition has broken,
under pressures both from within and without. It would be

4 8

IRRATIONAL MAN

possible to avoid this painful conclusion, and to dismiss this
group of artists as mere irresponsibles, and skillful renegades
from the tradition, if there were any artists of comparable
achievement whose work the anti-modernist could set over
against theirs. But what is equally sure—and this negative
evidence is strong or even stronger on the side of the mod¬
ems—is that the academic art of this period is as dead as
mutton. It excites no one, depresses no one, and does not
even really soothe anyone. It simply does not live; it is out¬
side the time.

If we turn to the internal and formal characteristics of
modem art, without reference to its external inspirations in
African or primitive or Oriental art, we find the same in¬
dications of a radical transformation of the Western spirit.
Cubism is the classicism of modem art: that is, the one for¬
mally perfected style which modem art has elaborated and
from which all modem abstract art that is valid has derived.
A great deal of nonsense has been written about the crea¬
tion of Cubism, connecting it with relativity physics, psy¬
choanalysis, and heaven knows how many other complex
and remote things. The fact is that the painters who cre¬
ated Cubism were creating paintings and nothing else—cer¬
tainly they were not dealing in ideologies. Cubism evolved
in a succession of perfectly logical steps out of previous
stages of painting, out of the Impressionists and Cezanne,
and it raised a series of pictorial problems that had to be
solved within the medium of painting and by painters work¬
ing strictly as painters—that is, upon the visual image as
such.

Yet a great formal style in painting has never been cre¬
ated that did not draw upon the depths of the human spirit,
and that did not, in its newness, express a fresh mutation
of the human spirit. Cubism achieved a radical flattening
of space by insisting on the two-dimensional fact of the can¬
vas. This flattening out of space would seem not to be a
negligible fact historically if we reflect that when, once be¬
fore in history, such a development occurred but in the op¬
posite direction—when the flatness of the Gothic or primitive

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART

49

painters passed over into the solidity, perspective, and
three-dimensional style of early Renaissance painting—it
was a mark that man was turning outward, into space, after
the long period of introspection of the Middle Ages. West¬
ern man moved out into space in his painting, in the four¬
teenth century, before he set forth into actual physical space
in the age of exploration that was to follow. Thus painting
was prophetic of the new tum of the human spirit which
was eventually to find expression in the conquest of the
whole globe. Have we the right, then, to suggest that the
flattening of painting in our own century portends a turn¬
ing inward of the human spirit, or at any rate a turning
away from that outer world of space which has hitherto
been the ultimate arena of Western man’s extroversion?
With Cubism begins that process of detachment from the
object which has become the hallmark of modem art. Even
though Cubism is a classical and formal style, the artist
nevertheless asserts his own subjectivity by the freedom
with which he cuts up and dislocates objects—bottles, pitch¬
ers, guitars—as it pleases him for the sake of the picture,
which is now no longer held up to us as a representation
of those objects but as a visual image with its own inde¬
pendent value alongside that of nature. The subjectivity
that is generally present in modem art is a psychological
compensation for, sometimes a violent revolt against, the
gigantic extemalization of life within modem society. The
world pictured by the modem artist is, like the world medi¬
tated upon by the existential philosopher, a world where
man is a stranger.

When mankind no longer lives spontaneously turned to¬
ward God or the supersensible world—when, to echo the
words of Yeats, the ladder is gone by which we would
climb to a higher reality—the artist too must stand face to
face with a flat and inexplicable world. This shows itself
even in the formal structures of modem art. Where the
movement of the spirit is no longer vertical but only hori¬
zontal, the climactic elements in art are in general leveled
out, flattened. The flattening of pictorial space that is
achieved in Cubism is not an isolated fact, true only of

5 °

IRRATIONAL MAN

painting, but is paralleled by similar changes in literary
techniques. There is a general process of flattening, three
chief aspects of which may be noted:

(1) The flattening out of all planes upon the plane of
the picture. Near and far are pushed together. So in certain
works of modem literature time, instead of space, is flat¬
tened out upon one plane. Past and present are represented
as occurring simultaneously, upon a single plane of time.
James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and
Ezra Pound’s Cantos are examples; and perhaps the most
powerful use of the device was made by Faulkner in his
early novel The Sound, and the Fury.

(2) More important perhaps is the flattening out of
climaxes, which occurs both in painting and literature. In
traditional Western painting there is a central subject, lo¬
cated at or near the center of the picture, and the surround¬
ing space in the picture is subordinate to this. In a portrait
the figure is placed near the center, and the background
becomes secondary to it, something to be blended as har¬
moniously as possible with the figure. Cubism abolished
this idea of the pictorial climax: the whole space of the
picture became of equal importance. Negative spaces (in
which there are no objects) are as important as positive
spaces (the contours of physical objects). If a human figure
is treated, it may be broken up and distributed over various
parts of the canvas. Formally speaking, the spirit of this
art is anticlimactic.

When we tum to observe this same deflation or flatten¬
ing of climaxes in literature, the broader human and philo¬
sophic questions involved become much clearer. The classi¬
cal tradition in literature, deriving from Aristotle’s Poetics,
tells us that a drama (and consequently any other literary
work) must have a beg innin g, middle, and end. The action
begins at a certain point, rises toward a climax, and then
falls to a denouement. One can diagram a classical plot of
this kind by means of a triangle whose apex represents the
climax with which everything in the play has some logical
and necessary connection. The author subordinates himself
to the requirements of logic, necessity, probability. His

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART

51

structure must be an intelligible whole in which each part
develops logically out of what went before. If our existence
itself is never quite like this, no matter; art is a selection
from life, and the poet is required to be selective. However,
it is important to note that this canon of intelligible literary
structure—beginning, middle, and end, with a well-defined
climax—arose in a culture in which the universe too was
believed to be an ordered structure, a rational and intelligi¬
ble whole.

What happens if we try to apply this classical Aristo¬
telian canon to a modem work like Joyce’s Ulysses,
734 pages of power and dullness, beauty and sordidness,
comedy and pathos, where the movement is always hori¬
zontal, never ascending toward any crisis, and where we
detect not the shadow of any thin g like a climax, in the
traditional sense of that term? If Joyce’s had been a dis¬
ordered mind, we could dismiss all this as a sprawling
chaos; but he was in fact an artist in superb control of his
material, so that the disorder has to be attributed to his
material, to life itself. It is, in fact, the banal gritty thing
that we live that Joyce gives us, in comparison with which
most other fiction is indeed fiction. This world is dense,
opaque, unintelligible; that is the datum from which the
modem artist always starts. The formal dictates of the well-
made play or the well-made novel, which were the logical
outcome of thoroughly rational preconceptions about real¬
ity- we can no longer hold to when we become attentive
“to the things themselves,” to the facts, to existence in the
mode in which we do exist. If our epoch still held to the
idea, as Western man once did, that the whole of reality is
a system in which each detail providentially and rationally
is subordinated to others and ultimately to the whole itself,
we could demand of the artist that his form imitate this
idea of reality, and give us coherence, logic, and the pic¬
ture of a world with no loose ends. But to make such a
demand nowadays is worse than an impertinence: it is a
travesty upon the historical being of the artist.

Even where the writer has more of a story, in the tradi¬
tional sense, to tell, he may prefer not to tell it in the tradi-

52

IRRATIONAL MAN

tional way. In The Sound and the Fury Faulkner has much
more of a novelistic narrative than Joyce in Ulysses— the de¬
cline of a family, a suicide, the elopement of a girl, and so
on—but he chooses not to present these events in the form
of the well-made novel. And the choice is wise, for the
power of the novel is increased immeasurably thereby. The
brute, irrational, given quality of the world comes through
so strongly in Faulkner’s peculiar technique that he actu¬
ally shows, and does not merely state, the meaning of the
quotation from which his title is derived:

[Life] is a tale,

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.

Signifying nothing.

Shakespeare places these lines in the context of a fairly
well-made tragedy in which evil is destroyed and good tri¬
umphs; but Faulkner shows us the world of which Shake¬
speare’s statement would be true: a world opaque, dense,
and irrational, that could not have existed for Shakespeare,
close as he was still to medieval Christianity. Even where
a purposeful human action is planned, in the novel, and the
necessary steps taken to carry it through—as in the section
on the day Quentin Compson commits suicide—what really
happens has little to do with the traditional order, logic,
sequence of events that normally accompany such an ac¬
tion. The day described shows us not the abstraction
“Quentin Compson commits suicide” but, as the author
turns his own and his reader’s eye “to the things them¬
selves,” a process far more concrete and contingent: a spar¬
row chirps at the window, a watch breaks, the hero gets
entangled in a perfectly absurd melee with a little runaway
girl, there is a fist fight, etc.; and underneath all this is, but
never mentioned, the slow blind surge moving forward like
an underground river toward the sea, of a man’s going to
his death. This section, and the book itself, is a master¬
piece, perhaps as great as anything yet written by an
American; and is to be recommended to anyone who
wants to know the concrete feel of that world with which
in his thinking the existential philosopher has to deal.

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART

53

In the course of the brute random flow of detail that is
that last day of his life, Quentin Compson breaks the crystal
of his watch. He twists off the two hands and thereafter,
throughout the day, the watch continues to tick loudly but
cannot, with its faceless dial, indicate the time. Faulkner
could not have hit on a better image to convey the sense of
time which permeates the whole book. The normal reckon-
able sequence of time—one moment after another—has been
broken, has disappeared; but as the watch pounds on, time
is all the more urgent and real for Quentin Compson. He
cannot escape time, he is in it, it is the time of his fate and
his decision; and the watch has no hands to reassure him of
that normal, calculable progression of minutes and hours in
which our ordinary day-to-day life is passed. Time is no
longer a reckonable sequence, then, for him, but an inex¬
haustible inescapable presence. We are close here—as we
shall see later—to the thought of Heidegger. (Faulkner cer¬
tainly never read Heidegger; he may never even have
heard of him. So much the better; for the testimony of the
artist, the poet, is all the more valid when it is not con¬
taminated by any intellectual preconceptions.) Real time,
the time that makes up the dramatic substance of our life,
is something deeper and more primordial than watches,
clocks, and calendars. Time is the dense medium in which
Faulkner’s characters move about as if dragging their feet
through water: it is their substance or Being, as Heidegger
would put it. The abolition of clock time does not mean a
retreat into the world of the timeless; quite the contrary:
the timeless world, the eternal, has disappeared from the
horizon of the modem writer as it has from the horizon of
modem Existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger, and from
the horizon of our own everyday life; and time thereby be¬
comes all the more inexorable and absolute a reality. The
temporal is the horizon of modem man, as the eternal was
the horizon of the man of the Middle Ages. That modem
writers have been so preoccupied with the reality of time,
handling it with radically new techniques and from radi¬
cally new points of view, is evidence that the philosophers
in our age who have attempted a new understanding of

54

IRRATIONAL MAN

time are responding to the same hidden historical con¬
cerns, and are not merely elaborating some new conceptual
novelty out of their heads.

These details about art, it should be apparent to the
reader, are not dragged in by the heels. Nor are they the
elaborate constructions which it has become the critical
fashion in this country to force upon works of art. On the
contrary, the features we have mentioned lie open and ac¬
cessible—on the very surface, so to speak, of the works of
art themselves; and to see them requires only that we take
art seriously, which means to take it as a revelation: a reve¬
lation of its time and of the being of man, and of the two
together, the being of man in his time.

No beginning, middle, end—such is the structureless
structure that some modem literary works struggle toward;
and analogously in painting, no clearly demarcated fore¬
ground, middleground, and background. To the tradition¬
alist, immersed in the classical Western tradition, all this
will appear negative, purely destructive. But if we do not
keep our gaze narrowly riveted on the tradition of the West
(and in any case this classical canon is only one of the tradi¬
tions that have arisen in the course of the whole history of
the West), we find that these requirements of logical and
rational form do not hold for other traditions of art in other
cultures. Oriental art, for example, is much more formless,
organic, and sprawling than classical Western art. It has
form, but a different form from that of the West. Why is
this? The question is not a trivial one; it is perhaps as pro¬
found as any the West can ask these days, for this difference
in art is not mere happenstance but the inevitable concomi¬
tant of a different attitude toward the world.

One of the best indications of this peculiar (to us) sense
of artistic form among Orientals is given by E. M. Forster
in his novel A Passage to India. A mixed group, English
and Indians, are at tea, and Professor Godbole, a Hindu,
has been asked to sing, but has let the occasion go by; then,
as all are leaving, the Hindu says, “I may sing now,” quite
unexpectedly. (This unexpectedness is significant, for the
song is not to be given a formal setting, but to drop upon

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART 55

their ears as casually and contingently as life itself.) For¬
ster’s description of the song makes our point so beautifully
that it is worth quoting in its entirety:

His thin voice rose, and gave out one sound after another.
At times there seemed rhythm, at times there was the
illusion of a Western melody. But the ear, baffled re¬
peatedly, soon lost any clue, and wandered in a maze of
noises, none harsh or unpleasant, none intelligible. It was
the song of an unknown bird. Only the servants under¬
stood it. They began to whisper to one another. The man
who was gathering water chestnuts came naked out of
the tank, his lips parted with delight, disclosing his scar¬
let tongue. The sounds continued and ceased after a few
moments as casually as they had begun—apparently half
through a bar, and upon the subdominant.

The song begins, goes on, suddenly stops; but there is not
the least trace of an Aristotelian beginning, middle, or end.
Compare Godbole’s song with the structure of an aria from
an Italian opera. In the latter we have a beginning, a de¬
velopment through certain predictable phases toward the
inevitable climax of the high note, and then the falling
away or denouement, tying up the whole thing in a neat
package: here is Aristotelian and rational form in music.
But the Oriental song baffles the ear of the Westerner; it
appears unintelligible. The reason is that the Westerner de¬
mands (or, let us say, used to demand) an intelligibility
that the Easterner does not. If the Westerner finds the Ori¬
ental music “meaningless,” the Oriental might very well re¬
ply that this is the meaninglessness of nature itself which
goes on endlessly without beginning, middle, or end.

The real reason for the difference between the sense of
artistic form in the East and in the West is thus ultimately
a difference in philosophic outlook. Since the Greeks, West¬
ern man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible,
that there is a reason for everything (at least, the central
tradition that runs from Aristotle through St. Thomas Aqui¬
nas into the beginning of the modem period has held this),
and that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on

56

IRRATIONAL, MAN

the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe
that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational West¬
ern mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence
the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one
that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.
That the Western artist now finds his own inherited classical
form unconvincing and indeed almost intolerable is because
of a profound change in his total attitude toward the world
—a change that is no less true even when the artist himself
has not been able to bring it to conceptual expression. The
final intelligibility of the world is no longer accepted. Our
existence, as we know it, is no longer transparent and un¬
derstandable by reason, bound together into a tight, coher¬
ent structure. The world that we are shown in the work of
the modem painters and writers is opaque and dense. Their
vision is not inspired primarily by intellectual premises; it
is a spontaneous revelation of the kind of which perhaps
only art is capable: it shows us where we stand, whether or
not we choose to understand it. If we really open ourselves
to the experience of two works of art as widely separated
in time as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Faulkner’s The
Sound and the Fury, the distance that Western man has
traveled in the intervening centuries is revealed to us more
clearly than through any number of abstract arguments.
And the road that has been traveled is irreversible.

(3) The last and most important aspect of what we
have called the process of flattening in modem art is the
flattening out of values. To understand this one can begin
at the simplest level in painting, where it means merely that
large and small objects are treated as of equal value.
Cezanne paints apples with the same passionate concentra¬
tion as he paints mountains, and each apple is as monu¬
mental as a mountain. Indeed, in some of Cezanne’s still
lifes, if one covers up all of the picture except a certain
patch of folded tablecloth, one might very well be looking
at the planes and peaks of his Mont St. Victoire. For
Cezanne the painting dictates its own values: little and big,
high and low, sublime and ordinary outside the painting

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART 57

are of equal importance if in a given painting they play the
same plastic role.

Now all this is quite contrary to the great tradition of
Western art, which distinguishes sharply between the sub¬
lime and the banal and requires that the highest art treat
the most sublime subjects. The mind of the West has al¬
ways been hierarchical: the cosmos has been understood as
a great chain of Being, from highest to lowest, which has
at the same time operated as a scale of values, from lowest
to highest. Painters were expected to portray the sublime
scenes from the Gospel, great battles, or noble personages.
The beginning of genre painting in the seventeenth century
was the first step toward what we now think of as modem
painting, but it was not until the present century that the
reversal of Western values was really accomplished. By
now, the hierarchical scheme has been abolished altogether.
Following Cezanne, the Cubists took as subjects for their
most monumental paintings ordinary objects like tables,
bottles, glasses, guitars. Now the painter dispenses with ob¬
jects altogether: the colored shape on his canvas is itself an
absolute reality, perhaps more so than the imaginary scene,
the great battle, which in a traditional canvas it might serve
to depict. Thus we arrive at last at Tart brut (raw, crude,
or brute art), which seeks to abolish not only the ironclad
distinction between the sublime and the banal but that be¬
tween the beautiful and the ugly as well. Says the painter
Dubuffet, one of the more interesting cultivators of this
style:

The idea that there are beautiful objects and ugly
objects, people endowed with beauty and others who
cannot claim it, has surely no other foundation than con¬
vention-old poppycock—and I declare that convention
unhealthy. . . . People have seen that I intend to sweep
away everything we have been taught to consider—with¬
out question—as grace and beauty; but have overlooked
my work to substitute another and vaster beauty, touch¬
ing all objects and beings, not excluding the most de¬
spised—and because of that, all the more exhilarating.

58

IRRATIONAL MAN

... I would like people to look at my work as an
enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values, and,
in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent cele¬
bration. . . .

I am convinced that any table can be for each of
us a landscape as inexhaustible as the whole Andes
range. . . .

I am struck by the high value, for a man, of a simple
permanent fact, like the miserable vista on which the
window of his room opens daily, that comes, with the
passing of time, to have an important role in his life. I
often think that the highest destination at which a paint¬
ing can aim is to take on that function in someone’s life.

Such ideas seem scandalous to the Western traditionalist;
they undermine the time-honored canon of beauty, counte¬
nance the most disorderly elements in existence, and strike
against art itself. Yet they are ideas that might be easily
understood by an Oriental. For the Oriental, opposites have
never been put into separate watertight compartments as
with the Westerner: as it is above, so it is below, in the
East; the small is equal to the great, for amid the endless
expanse of countless universes, each individual universe is
as but a grain of sand on the shores of the Ganges, and a
grain of sand is the equal of a universe. The lotus blooms
in the mud; and generally the Oriental is as willing, in his
indifference, to accept the ugly dross of existence as he is
its beauty, where the Westerner might very well gag at the
taste. We are not concerned here with the question of
whether the West is now moving toward forms of thinking
and feeling that are closer to what were once those of the
East. What is of concern to the philosopher is the fact that
here, in art, we find so many signs of a break with the West¬
ern tradition, or at least with what had been thought to be
the Western tradition; the philosopher must occupy him¬
self with this break if he is to recast the meaning of this
tradition.

The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Western art
does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART 59

contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of
existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less ar¬
tificial celebration of the world. In literature, again, the
crucial example is Joyce’s Ulysses. It was not a literary critic
but a psychologist, C. G. Jung, who perceived that this
book was non-Westem in spirit; he sees it as Oriental to
such an extent that he recommends it as a much-needed
bible to the white-skinned races. For Ulysses breaks with
the whole tradition of Western sensibility and Western aes¬
thetics in showing each small object of Bloom’s day—even
the objects in his pocket, like a cake of soap—as capable
at certain moments of taking on a transcendental impor¬
tance—or in being, at any rate, equal in value to those ob¬
jects to which men usually attribute transcendental impor¬
tance. Each grain of sand, Joyce seems to be saying (as
the Oriental says), reflects the whole universe—and the
Irish writer was not in the least a mystic; he simply takes
experience as it comes, in the course of the single day he
depicts in the novel. Any such break with tradition, where
a serious reversal of values is involved, is of course dan¬
gerous, for the artist runs the risk of losing the safeguards
that the experience of the past has erected for him. A good
deal of modem art has clearly succumbed to this danger,
and the result is disorder in the art and the artist; but the
danger is the price that must be paid for any step forward
by the human spirit.

We have seen thus far that modem art, in its formal and
structural qualities, is an art of breakdown and bold innova¬
tion, the expression of an epoch in which the accepted
structures and norms of Western civilization are either in a
state of dissolution or at least stand in question. But now,
what about the content of this art? What does this content
tell us about man? In what ways does it compel the phi¬
losopher to recast his traditional concept of man?

Every age projects its own image of man into its art. The
whole history of art confirms this proposition, indeed this
history is itself but a succession of images of man. A Greek
figure is not just a shape in stone but the image of man in

6o

IRRATIONAL MAN

the light of which the Greeks lived. If you compare, feature
by feature, the bust of a Roman patrician with the head of
a medieval saint—as Andre Malraux has done with a spec¬
tacularly sharp eye in his Voices of Silence —you cannot ac¬
count in formal terms for the difference between them: the
two heads stare at each other and cancel each other out;
they give us two different images of the destiny and possi¬
bilities of being a man. The Roman head shows us the face
of the imperium, of power and empire, the Christian the
face of the Incarnation, the humility of the earthly trans¬
figured by the Divine. If we knew nothing at all about
Taoism, we could still reconstruct from Chinese Sung paint¬
ing what the Taoist felt about man and nature. And so it
goes. Whenever a civilization has lived in terms of a certain
image of man, we can see this image in its art; sometimes
the image is present even when it was never articulated in
thought, the artist in this way anticipating the philosopher.
With primitive or prehumanist art it is another matter; here
we are presented with images that are much more primor¬
dial and abstract, and we are not able to discern in them
the features of man. In those primitive cultures humanism
had not yet come into existence. Man was still too close to
his totem animal. Yet even in this art if we will, we can
see the image—or non-image—of man in the light of which
the primitives lived, in the archetypal images from which
man’s own individuated features have not yet emerged.

And now, what about modem art? What image of man
do we find in it?

It is very suggestive that modem artists have discovered
primitive art to be valid for them and have found a strange
kinship with its forms. To be sure, when the modem artist
uses primitive motifs, they mean for him something alto¬
gether different from what they meant for the primitive.
One cannot undo thirty centuries of civilization. Neverthe¬
less, the extraordinarily vital attraction which primitive art
now has for us is of no little significance. The tradition of
Western humanism has faltered, become questionable; we
are not so sure any more that we know what man is, and
we do know in this century what blind forces can disturb

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART 6l

or destroy his so-called humanity. Hence we respond to the
archetypal images of prehumanist man, more abstract and
impersonal than the features of man as we know him.

The one thing that is not clear in modem art is its image
of man. We can select a figure from Greek art, from the
Renaissance, or the Middle Ages and say with some cer¬
tainty, “That is the image of man as the Greek, the medie¬
val, or Renaissance man conceived him.” I do not think we
can find any comparably clear-cut image of man amid the
bewildering thicket of modem art. And this is not because
we are too close to the period, as yet, to stand back and
make such a selection. Rather, the variety of images is too
great and too contradictory to coalesce into any single
shape or form. May the reason why modem art offers us
no clear-cut image of man not be that it already knows—
whether or not it has brought this knowledge to conceptual
expression—that man is a creature who transcends any
image because he has no fixed essence or nature, as a stone
or a tree have?

A good deal of modem art has been concerned, in any
case, simply with the destruction of the traditional image of
man. Man is laid bare; more than that, he is flayed, cut
up into bits, and his members strewn everywhere, like those
of Osiris, with the reassembling of these scattered parts not
even promised but only dumbly waited for. Our novels are
increasingly concerned with the figure of the faceless and
anonymous hero, who is at once everyman and nobody.
Perhaps, again, it is Joyce who began this process of dis¬
section, and he can even evoke an echo of prehumanist art
in the incident of Odysseus’ encounter with the blind giant
Polyphemus, in which the Greek hero calls himself ou tis,
Noman, the man without an identity. In the novels of Franz
Kafka the hero is a cipher, an initial; a cipher, to be sure,
with an overwhelming passion to find out his individual
place and responsibility— thin gs which are not given to him
a priori and which he dies without ever finding out. The
existence of this cipher who does not discover his own
meaning is marginal, in the sense that he is always beyond
the boundary of what is secure, stable, meaningful, or-

62

IRRATIONAL MAN

dained. Modem literature tends to be a literature of “ex¬
treme situations,” to use Jaspers’ expression. It shows us
man at the end of his tether, cut off from the consolations
of all that seems so solid and earthly in the daily round of
life—that seems so as long as this round is accepted without
question.

Naturally enough, this faceless hero is everywhere ex¬
posed to Nothingness. When, by chance or fate, we fall
into an extreme situation—one, that is, on the far side of
what is normal, routine, accepted, traditional, safeguarded
—we are threatened by the void. The solidity of the so-
called real world evaporates under the pressure of our sit¬
uation. Our being reveals itself as much more porous, much
less substantial than we had thought it—it is like those
cryptic human figures in modem sculpture that are full of
holes or gaps. Nothingness has, in fact, become one of the
chief themes in modem art and literature, whether it is di¬
rectly named as such or merely drifts through the work as
the ambiance in which the human figures live, move, and
have their being. We are reminded of the elongated and
attenuated figures of the sculptor Giacometti, figures that
seem to be invaded by the surrounding void. “Some live in
it and never know it," writes Hemingway in the story “A
Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” which presents in its six or
seven pages a vision of Nothing that is perhaps as powerful
as any in modem art; and he continues, “It was all a noth¬
ing, and man is a nothing too." The example of Hemingway
is valuable here, for he is not an artist inspired by intellec¬
tual themes; quite the contrary, he is a reporter and a poet
intent on reporting what it is he really sees in experience,
and what he has seen and reports to us in this story is the
Nothing that sometimes rises up before the eyes of human
beings.® A story by Sartre on the same subject would be
much more suspect to us: we would have reason to believe
that the Existentialist writer was loading the dice intellec¬
tually, reporting on experience out of a previous philosophi¬
cal commitment. But to reject Hemingway’s vision of the

* For a more detailed treatment of the theme of this story see
Appendices, pp. 283—286.

THE TESTIMONY OF MODERN ART 63

Nothing, of No thin gness, might well be to close our eyes to
our own experience.

It is worth emphasizing, once again, that the vision of
Nothingness with which modem art presents us does ex¬
press a real encounter, one that is part of the historical
destiny of the time. Creative artists do not produce such a
vision out of nowhere. Nor in general do audiences or read¬
ers fail to respond to it. When a play Waiting far Godot,
by an Irish disciple of Joyce’s, Samuel Beckett—a play in
which Nothingness circulates through every line from be¬
ginning to end—runs for more than sixteen months to packed
houses in the capitals of Europe, we can only conclude that
something is at work in the European mind against which
its traditions cannot wholly guard it and which it will have
to live through to the bitter end. Surely the audience at
Beckett’s play recognized something of its own experience
in what it saw on the stage, some echo, however veiled, of
its own emptiness and, in Heidegger’s phrase, its “waiting
for God.” It is not only stuffy and pompous of the Philistine
to reject these responses in artist and in audience, but dan¬
gerously unintelligent, for he loses thereby the chance of
finding out where he hims elf stands historically.

An epoch, as we have seen, reveals itself in its religion,
its social forms, but perhaps most profoundly or, at any
rate, lucidly in its art. Through modem art our time reveals
itself to itself, or at least to those persons who are willing to
look at their own age dispassionately and without the blind¬
ness of preconceptions, in the looking glass of its art. In our
epoch existential philosophy has appeared as an intellectual
expression of the time, and this philosophy exhibits numer¬
ous points of contact with modem art. The more closely we
examine the two together, the stronger becomes the impres¬
sion that existential philosophy is the authentic intellectual
expression of our time, as modem art is the expression of
the time in terms of image and intuition.

Not only do the two treat similar themes, but both start
off from the sense of crisis and of a break in the Western
tradition. Modem art has discarded the traditional assump-

IRRATIONAL MAN

64

tions of rational form. The modem artist sees man not as
the rational animal, in the sense handed down to the West
by the Greeks, but as something else. Reality, too, reveals
itself to the artist not as the Great Chain of Being, which
the tradition of Western rationalism had declared intelligi¬
ble down to its smallest link and in its totality, but as much
more refractory: as opaque, dense, concrete, and in the end
inexplicable. At the limits of reason one comes face to face
with the meaningless; and the artist today shows us the ab¬
surd, the inexplicable, the meaningless in our daily life.

This break with the Western tradition imbues both phi¬
losophy and art with the sense that everything is question¬
able, problematic. Our time, said Max Scheler, is the first
in which man has become thoroughly and completely prob¬
lematic to himself. Hence the themes that obsess both mod¬
ern art and existential philosophy are the alienation and
strangeness of man in his world; the contradictoriness, fee¬
bleness, and contingency of human existence; the central
and overwhelming reality of time for man who has lost his
anchorage in the eternal.

The testimony art brings to these themes is all the more
convincing in that it is spontaneous; it does not spring from
ideas or from any intellectual program. That modem art
which is most successful and powerful moves us because
we see in it the artist subordinate (as must always be the
case in art) to his vision. And since we recognize that man’s
being is historical through and through, we must take this
vision of modem art as a sign that the image of man which
has been at the center of our tradition till now must be
re-evaluated and recast.

There is a painful irony in the new image of man that is
emerging, however fragmentarily, from the art of our time.
An observer from another planet might well be struck by
the disparity between the enormous power which our age
has concentrated in its external life and the inner poverty
which our art seeks to expose to view. This is, after all, the
age that has discovered and harnessed atomic energy, that
has made airplanes that fly faster than the sun, and that
will, in a few years (perhaps in a few months), have

THE TESTIMONY OF MODEBN ABT

65

atomic-powered planes which can fly through outer space
and not need to return to mother earth for weeks. What
cannot man do I He has greater power now than Prometheus
or Icarus or any of those daring mythical heroes who were
later to succumb to the disaster of pride. But if an observer
from Mars were to turn his attention from these external
appurtenances of power to the shape of man as revealed in
our novels, plays, painting, and sculpture, he would find
there a creature full of holes and gaps, faceless, riddled with
doubts and negations, starkly finite.

However disconcerting this violent contrast between
power and impoverishment, there is something a little con¬
soling in it for anyone who is intimidated by excessive ma¬
terial power, as there is in learning that a dictator is a
drunkard or marked by some other ordinary failing which
makes him seem a trifle more human. If we are to redeem
any part of our world from the brute march of power, we
may have to begin as modem art does by exalting some of
the humble and dirty little comers of existence. On another
level, however, this violent contrast is frightening, for it rep¬
resents a dangerous lagging of man behind his own works;
and in this lag lies the terror of the atomic bomb which
hangs over us like impending night. Here surely the ordi¬
nary man begins to catch a fleeting glimpse of that Noth¬
ingness which both artist and philosopher have begun in
our time to take seriously. The bomb reveals the dreadful
and total contingency of human existence. Existentialism is
the philosophy of the atomic age.

In examining our time, we have seen everywhere the
signs and omens of a break either with or within the West¬
ern tradition; and since Existentialism is concerned with
these portents and is indeed one itself, we had better turn
back now and cast an eye on this tradition in order to see
how deeply the roots of Existentialism extend into it.

THE SOURCES OF
EXISTENTIALISM
IN THE WESTERN
TRADITION

Part Two

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

Chapter Four

In the celebrated chapter with this same title, in his Cul¬
ture and Anarchy, a book about the contemporary situation
in nineteenth-century England that has much to say to us
even today, Matthew Arnold writes:

We show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in
walking according to the best light we have, but are not
quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be
not darkness. This is only another version of the old story
that energy is our strong point and favorable character¬
istic, rather than intelligence. But we may give to this
idea a more general form still, in which it will have a yet
larger range of application. We may regard this energy
driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obliga¬
tion of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in
going manfully with the best light we have, as one force.
And we may regard the intelligence driving at those ideas
which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent
sense for all the new and changing combinations of them
which man’s development brings with it, the indomitable
impulse to know and adjust them perfectly, as another
force. And these two forces we may regard as in some
sense rivals—rivals not by the necessity of their own na¬
ture, but as exhibited in man and his history—and rivals
dividing the empire of the world between them. And to
give these forces names from the two races of men who
have supplied the most splendid manifestations of them,

70

IRRATIONAL. MAN

we may call them respectively the forces of Hebraism
and Hellenism. Hebraism and Hellenism—between these
two points of influence moves our world. At one time it
feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at
another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it
never is, evenly and happily balanced between them.

Hebraism sometimes seems for Arnold to wear too markedly
the stiff bewhiskered face of a British mid-Victorian mem¬
ber of the Dissenting Churches. We have learned a good
deal about the Hebraic mind, since his day, and our picture
of it will be more complicated. Nevertheless, it is well to
begin with this genial and simple passage from Arnold,
which so rightly perceives the distinction between the two
types and sets forth their long historical battle in such clear-
cut terms.

The distinction, as Arnold so lucidly states it, arises from
the difference between doing and knowing. The Hebrew is
concerned with practice, the Greek with knowledge. Right
conduct is the ultimate concern of the Hebrew, right think¬
ing that of the Greek. Duty and strictness of conscience are
the paramount things in life for the Hebrew; for the Greek,
the spontaneous and luminous play of the intelligence. The
Hebrew thus extols the moral virtues as the substance and
meaning of life; the Greek subordinates them to the intellec¬
tual virtues, and Arnold rightly observes: “The moral vir¬
tues are with Aristotle but the porch and access to the in¬
tellectual, and with these last is blessedness.” So far all
this is quite simple and clear: the contrast is between prac¬
tice and theory, between the moral man and the theoretical
or intellectual man. But then Arnold goes on to make an¬
other point, which is somehow outside the framework with
which he started:

To get rid of one’s ignorance, to see things as they are,
and by seeing them as they are to see them in their
beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which Hellen¬
ism holds out before human nature; and from the sim¬
plicity and charm of this idea, Hellenism, and human life
in the hands of Hellenism, is invested with a kind of aerial

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

71

ease, clearness, and radiancy; they are full of what we
call sweetness and light. Difficulties are kept out of view,
and the beauty and rationalness of the ideal have all our
thoughts.

While Arnold admires this ideal of sweetness and light, he
nevertheless feels that it may not take into consideration
one troubling aspect of the human condition, and he goes
on to quote a remark that may or may not have been made
by Thomas Carlyle:

“Socrates,” this saying goes, “is terribly at ease in
Zion.” Hebraism—and here is the source of its wonderful
strength—has always been severely preoccupied with an
awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in Zion;
of the difficulties which oppose themselves to man’s pur¬
suit or attainment of that perfection of which Socrates
talks so hopefully, and, as from this point of view one
might almost say, so glibly. It is all very well to talk of
getting rid of one’s ignorance, of seeing things in their
reality, seeing them in their beauty; but how is this to be
done when there is something which thwarts and spoils
all our efforts?

This something is sin.

What Arnold perceives here is that deep within Biblical
man lurks a certain uneasiness, which is not to be found in
the conceptions of man given us by the great Greek philoso¬
phers. This uneasiness points toward another, and more
central, region of human existence than the contrast be¬
tween doing and knowing, morality and reason. To be sure,
Arnold seeks to tie in this uneasiness of Biblical man with
his main thesis, which is the distinction between moral
practice and intellectual culture, by introducing the idea of
sin. But the sinfulness that man experiences in the Bible—
as in the Psalms or the Book of Job—cannot be confined to
a supposed compartment of the individual’s being that has
to do with his moral acts. This sinfulness pervades the
whole being of man: it is indeed man’s being, insofar as in
his feebleness and finiteness as a creature he stands naked

72

IRRATIONAL MAN

in the presence of God. This idea of man’s fmiteness takes
us beyond the distinctions of practice and theory, morality
and knowledge, toward the center from which all such dis¬
tinctions stem.

It is at this center that we must begin, in our rethinking
of Arnold’s distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism.
We have learned a good deal not only about Hebraic
thought but about the Greeks since Arnold’s time, and we
shall have to qualify his picture of the latter’s aerial light¬
ness and ease. The radiant and harmonious Greek Arnold
depicted he had inherited from eighteenth-century classi¬
cism. We know considerably more now about Greek pessi¬
mism and the negation of life that it brought with it. We
know more about the Orphic religions, which had their own
powerful sense of the sinful and fallen state of man, and
which exerted such an influence upon Plato. When Plato
says that the body is a tomb and that to philosophize is
to learn to die, he is not just tossing off a few idle rhetorical
figures. From his Orphic and Pythagorean sources we can
see that the whole impulse of philosophy for Plato arises
from an ardent search for deliverance from the evils of the
world and the curse of time. The Greeks did not produce
their tragic plays out of nothing, as Nietzsche was almost
the first to observe less than a century ago. Greek tragedy
comes out of an acute sense of the suffering and evil of life.

Nevertheless, Arnold is fundamentally right in his distinc¬
tion between Hebrew and Greek, as is shown by the gifts
bestowed on humanity by the two races: the Greeks gave
us science and philosophy; the Hebrews gave us the Law.
No other people—not the Chinese, not the Hindus—pro¬
duced theoretical science, and its discovery or invention by
the Greeks has been what has distinguished Western civili¬
zation from the other civilizations of the globe. In the same
way, the uniqueness of Western religion is due to its He¬
braic source, and the religious history of the West is the
long story of the varying fortunes and mutations of the
spirit of Hebraism.

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

73

1. THE HEBRAIC MAN OF FAITH

The Law, however, is not really at the center of Hebra¬
ism. At the center lies that which is the foundation and the
basis of the Law, and without which the Law, even in the
most Pharisaical tradition, would be but an empty shell.
Here we have to think beyond Arnold. To be sure, the Law
—the absolutely binding quality of its ritual and command¬
ments—has been what has held the Jewish community to¬
gether over its centuries of suffering and prevented this peo¬
ple from extermination. But if we go back to the Hebraic
sources, to man as he is revealed to us in the Bible, we see
that something more primitive and more fundamental lies
at the basis of the moral law. We have to learn to reread
the Book of Job in order to see this—reread it in a way that
takes us beyond Arnold and into our own time, reread it
with an historical sense of the primitive or primary mode
of existence of the people who gave expression to this work.
For earlier man, the outcome of the Book of Job was not
such a foregone conclusion as it is for us later readers, for
whom centuries of familiarity and forgetfulness have dulled
the violence of the confrontation between man and God
that is central to the narrative. For earlier man, seeing for
the first time beyond the routine commandments of his re¬
ligion, there was a Promethean excitement in Job’s coming
face to face with his Creator and demanding justification.
The stage comparable to this, with the Greeks, is the emer¬
gence of critical and philosophical reflection upon the gods
and their ways, the first use of rational consciousness as an
instrument to examine a religion that had been up to that
time traditional and ritualistic. The Hebrew, however, pro¬
ceeds not by the way of reason but by the confrontation of
the whole man, Job, in the fullness and violence of his pas¬
sion with the unknowable and overwhelming God. And the
final solution for Job lies not in the rational resolution of
the problem, any more than it ever does in life, but in a
change and conversion of the whole man. The relation be¬
tween Job and God is a relation between an I and a Thou,
to use Martin Buber’s terms. Such a relation demands that

74

IRRATIONAL MAN

each being confront the other in his completeness; it is not
the confrontation of two rational minds each demanding an
explanation that will satisfy reason. The relation between
Job and God is on the level of existence and not of reason.
Rational doubt, in the sense of the term that the later philo¬
sophic tradition of the West has made familiar to us, never
enters Job’s mind, even in the very paroxysm of his revolt.
His relation to God remains one of faith from start to finish,
though, to be sure, this faith takes on the varying shapes of
revolt, anger, dismay, and confusion. Job says, “ Though he
slay me, yet will I trust in him,” but he adds what is usually
not brought to our attention as emphatically as the first part
of his saying: “But I will maintain my own ways before
him.” Job retains his own identity (“his own ways”) in con¬
fronting the Creator before whom he is as Nothing. Job in
the many shades and turnings of his faith is close to those
primitive peoples who may break, revile, and spit upon the
image of a god who is no longer favorable. Similarly, in
Psalm 89 David rebukes Yahweh for all the tribulations
that He has poured upon His people, and there can be no
doubt that we are here at the stage in history where faith is
so real that it permits man to call God to account. It is a
stage close to the primitive, but also a considerable step be¬
yond it: for the Hebrew had added a new element, faith,
and so internalized what was simply the primitive’s anger
against his god. When faith is full, it dares to express its
anger, for faith is the openness of the whole man toward
his God, and therefore must be able to encompass all hu¬
man modes of being.

Faith is trust—in the sense, at least initially, in which in
everyday life we say we trust so-and-so. As trust it is the
relation between one individual and another. Faith is trust
before it is belief—belief in the articles, creeds, and tenets of
a Church with which later religious history obscures this
primary meaning of the word. As trust, in the sense of the
opening up of one being toward another, faith does not in¬
volve any philosophical problem about its position relative
to faith and reason. That problem comes up only later when
faith has become, so to speak, propositional, when it has

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

75

expressed itself in statements, creeds, systems. Faith as a
concrete mode of being of the human person precedes
faith as the intellectual assent to a proposition, just as
truth as a concrete mode of human being precedes the
truth of any proposition. Moreover, this trust that em¬
braces a man’s anger and dismay, his bones and his bowels
—the whole man, in short—does not yet permit any separa¬
tion of soul from body, of reason from man’s irrational other
half. In Job and the Psalms man is very much a man of
flesh and blood, and his being as a creature is described
time and again in images that are starkly physical:

Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as
the clay; and wilt thou bring me into the dust again?

Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me
like cheese?

Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast
fenced me with bones and sinews.

And when Psalm 22 speaks of the sense of abandonment
and dereliction, it uses not the high, rarefied language of
introspection but the most powerful cry of the physical:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? . . .

Thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst
make me hope when I was upon my mother’s breasts.

I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God
from my mother’s belly . . .

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out
of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of
my bowels.

My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my
tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me
into the dust of death.

Protestantism later sought to revive this face-to-face con¬
frontation of man with his God, but could produce only a
pallid replica of the simplicity, vigor, and wholeness of this
original Biblical faith. Protestant man had thrown off the
husk of his body. He was a creature of spirit and inward-

76

IRRATIONAL MAN

ness, but no longer the man of flesh and belly, bones and
blood, that we find in the Bible. Protestant man would
never have dared confront God and demand an accounting
of His ways. That era in history had long since passed by
the time we come to the Reformation.

As a man of flesh and blood, Biblical man was very much
bound to the earth. “Remember, I beseech thee, that thou
hast made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into the
dust again?” Bound to the dust, he was bound to death;
a creature of time, whose being was temporal through and
through. The idea of eternity—eternity for man—does not
bulk large in the Bible beside the power and frequency of
the images of man’s mortality. God is the Everlasting, who,
though He meets man face to face, is altogether beyond
human ken and comparison; while man, who is as Nothing
before his Creator, is like all other beings of the dust a
creature of a day, whose temporal substance is repeatedly
compared to wind and shadow.

Man that is bom of woman is of few days, and full
of trouble.

He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he
fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essences, which
Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as af¬
fording the intellectual deliverance from the evil of time.
Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a de¬
tached intellect, one who, in Plato’s phrase, becomes a
“spectator of all time and all existence.” This ideal of the
philosopher as the highest human type—the theoretical in¬
tellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all
time and existence—is altogether foreign to the Hebraic con¬
cept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to
his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an
impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or
rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even
able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of
rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too
earth-bound, too laden with the oppressive images of mor-

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

77

tality, to permit him to experience the philosopher’s detach¬
ment. The notion of the immortality of the soul as an intel¬
lectual substance (and that that immortality might even be
demonstrated rationally) had not dawned upon the mind of
Biblical man. If he hoped at all to escape mortality it was
on the basis of personal trust that his Creator might raise
him once again from the dust.

All of this carries us beyond Arnold’s simple contrasting
of moral man with intellectual man, though his basic dis¬
tinction is left intact and in fact deepened. To sum up:

(1) The ideal man of Hebraism is the man of faith; for
Hellenism, at least as it came to ultimate philosophic ex¬
pression in its two greatest philosophers, Plato and Aris¬
totle, the ideal man is the man of reason, the philosopher
who as a spectator of all time and existence must rise above
these.

(2) The man of faith is the concrete man in his whole¬
ness. Hebraism does not raise its eyes to the universal and
abstract; its vision is always of the concrete, particular, in¬
dividual man. The Greeks, on the other hand, were the first
thinkers in history; they discovered the universal, the ab¬
stract and timeless essences, forms, and Ideas. The intoxica¬
tion of this discovery (which marked nothing less than the
earliest emergence and differentiation of the rational func¬
tion) led Plato to hold that man lives only insofar as he
lives in the eternal.

(3) There follows for the Greek the ideal of detachment
as the path of wisdom which only the philosopher can
tread. The word “theory” derives from the Greek verb
iheatai, which means to behold, to see, and is the root of
the word theater. At a theater we are spectators of an ac¬
tion in which we ourselves are not involved. Analogously,
the man of theory, the philosopher or pure scientist, looks
upon existence with detachment, as we behold spectacles
at the theater; and in this way he exists, to use Kierkegaard’s
expression, only upon the aesthetic level of existence.

The Hebraic emphasis is on commitment, the passionate
involvement of man with his own mortal being (at once
flesh and spirit), with his offspring, family, tribe, and

IRRATIONAL MAN

78

God; a man abstracted from such involvements would be,
to Hebraic thought, but a pale shade of the actual existing
human person.

(4) The eternal is a rather shadowy concept for the
Hebrew except as it is embodied in the person of the un¬
knowable and terrible God. For the Greek eternity is some¬
thing to which man has ready and continuous access
through his intellect.

(5) The Greek invented logic. His definition of man as
the rational animal is literally as the logical animal, to zoon
logikon; or even more literally the animal who has lan¬
guage, since logic derives from the verb legein, which
means to say, speak, discourse. Man is the animal of con¬
nected logical discourse.

For the Hebrew the status of the intellect is rather typi¬
fied by the silly and proud babbling of Job’s friends, whose
arguments never touch the core of the matter. Intellect and
logic are the pride of fools and do not touch the ultimate
issues of life, which transpire at a depth that language can
never reach, the ultimate depth of faith. Says Job at the end
of the Book: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the
ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.”

(6) The Greek pursues beauty and goodness as things
that are identical or at least always coincident; in fact he
gives them a single name, the beautiful-and-good, to kalo-
kagathia. The Hebraic sense of sin, to which Matthew
Arnold alludes, is too much aware of the galling and re¬
fractory aspects of human existence to make this easy iden¬
tification of the good and the beautiful. The sense of the
sinfulness of Biblical man is the sense of his radical finitude
in its aspect of imperfection. Hence his good must some¬
times wear an ugly face, just as beauty for him may be the
shining mask of evil and corruption.

It is unnecessary to extend this list. What is important
is to make clear the central intuition that informs each of
these two view's of man. The reader probably has already
divined that the features of Hebraic man are those which
existential philosophy has attempted to exhume and bring
to the reflective consciousness of our time, a time in which

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

79

as a matter of historical happening the Hebraic religion
(which means Western religion) no longer retains its un¬
conditional validity for the mass of mankind.

This sketch of a comparison perhaps tilts the balance a
little too heavily on the side of Hebraism. It is necessary,
however, to correct the impression left by Matthew Arnold
(and he is here a spokesman for a view that is still preva¬
lent) that the main content of Hebraism is its energy and
will toward morality. We have to insist on a noetic content
in Hebraism: Biblical man too had his knowledge, though
it is not the intellectual knowledge of the Greek. It is not
the kind of knowledge that man can have through reason
alone, or perhaps not through reason at all; he has it rather
through body and blood, bones and bowels, through trust
and anger and confusion and love and fear; through his
passionate adhesion in faith to the Being whom he can never
intellectually know. This kind of knowledge a man has
only through living, not reasoning, and perhaps in the end
he cannot even say what it is he knows; yet it is knowledge
all the same, and Hebraism at its source had this knowl¬
edge. To be sure, we have stacked the cards somewhat by
considering Hellenism more or less as it came to be ex¬
pressed by the philosophers, and particularly the philoso¬
pher Plato; Hellas also produced the tragic poets Aeschylus
and Sophocles, who had another kind of knowledge of life.
But it was Greece that produced philosophy, logic, science
—and also produced Plato, a figure who sums up all the
ambiguity of Hellenism as it circles round the momentous
issue of reason and the irrational in human life.

2. GREEK REASON

The Anglo-American philosopher Whitehead has re¬
marked that “Twenty-five hundred years of Western phi¬
losophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato.” Allowing for
the disparaging irony of the word “footnotes,” we can take
this statement as literally accurate. The themes, the ques¬
tions, and even to a great extent the terms of all subsequent
Western philosophy lie in germ in the writings of Plato. All

8 o

IRRATIONAJL MAN

later philosophers betray a filial dependence on Plato-
even Aristotle, the great hero of all anti-Platonists. And
while existential philosophy is a radical effort to break with
this Platonic tradition, yet paradoxically there is an existen¬
tial aspect to Plato’s thought. Such is the richness and
ambiguity of Plato as man and philosopher.

Plato began his philosophic career as the result of a con¬
version. This is surely an existential beginning. He had as¬
pired to be a dramatic poet, the biographer tells us, but
after a youthful encounter with Socrates he burned all his
manuscripts and dedicated himself to the search for wisdom
to which Socrates had given his life. Plato was to be en¬
gaged thereafter, for the rest of his life, in a war with the
poets that was first and foremost a war with the poet in
himself. The steps in Plato’s career, after that fateful en¬
counter with Socrates, enact a progress, as we shall see
later, that might have the title: Death of a Poet. Yet the
poet never quite dies in Plato—revile him as he does—and
at the end he returns to a great myth of creation, the
Timaeus, though it is told as an allegory of science and
metaphysics. His career is the victory of reason, or the
struggle for that victory, over the poetic and mythic func¬
tions, and it is all the more remarkable in that it took place
in a man who was so richly endowed with the poetic gift.

But this is more than a highly dramatic bit of personal
biography: it is an event of the greatest significance in
Western history, as it could only be in a man of Plato’s
greatness. In Plato rational consciousness as such becomes,
for the first time in human history, a differentiated psychic
function. (Perhaps Socrates achieved this before him, but
all we know of Socrates as a philosopher is through Plato’s
writings.) The momentousness of this emergence of reason
can be gauged by setting Greece over against the compara¬
bly high civilizations of India and China. These latter had
a great flowering of sages at a time close to that of the pre-
Socratics in Greece; but neither in India nor in China was
reason fully isolated and distinguished—that is, differen¬
tiated—from the rest of man’s psychic being, from his feeling
and intuition. Oriental man remains intuitive, not rational.

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM 8l

Great sages like Buddha and Lao-tse rose above the mythic,
but they did not become apostles of reason. The lifting of
reason fully out of the primeval waters of the unconscious
is a Greek achievement. And from the differentiation West¬
ern civilization takes on, subsequently, the character that
distinguishes it from the civilizations of the Orient. Science
itself, a peculiarly Western product, became possible only
through this differentiation of reason and its exaltation as
the crowning human power.

This emergence of reason that we can see taking place
in the Platonic writings was a momentous historical event
that spanned Plato’s own lifetime. We can gauge this span
by marking out at its beginning two thinkers earlier than
Plato, Heraclitus and Parmenides, who were flourishing
around 480 b.c., and at its end the achievement of Plato’s
pupil, Aristotle, who really carried the rational ideal
sketched by Plato in the Later Academy to its culmination.
In 399 b.c. Socrates was executed for nothing less than the
crime of rationalism—an act of reason that destroyed, so
the conservative Athenians thought, the gods of the tribe.
These dates can be marked as points on a curve, and this
curve is one of the most significant ever traced by man in
his history. From 480 b.c., the time of Heraclitus and
Parmenides, to the death of Aristotle in 322 b.c. is little
more than a century and a half. In that century and a half
man enters history as the rational animal.

Parmenides and Heraclitus were visionaries and seers.
Parmenides wrote in verse, and his poem opens by describ¬
ing itself as the account of a vision vouchsafed by the god¬
dess, who has taken the poet in her chariot beyond the
portals of the day and night. Heraclitus’ sayings are dark
and oracular, and they are meant to be taken as oracles—
visionary disclosures of the real. The Greek word for “I
know,” oida, is the perfect of the verb “to see” and means
“I have seen.” He who knows is the man who has seen,
who has had a vision. For earlier mankind, the sage, the
wise man, was the reader of oracles, of dreams and entrails,
the fortuneteller, the shaman. And he was the poet who,
in giving expression to the “big dreams” of the tribe, voiced

82

IRRATIONAL MAN

its hidden, its deepest and furthest wisdom. At the end of
the century and a half in which Plato and Aristotle lived,
this ideal sage had been transformed into the man of pure
intellect, whose highest embodiment was to be found in the
rational philosopher and the theoretical scientist. The vast
intuitive visions of nature, as found in the pre-Socratic
thinkers, gave way, in Aristotle, to the sobriety of science.

We are so used today to taking our rational conscious¬
ness for granted, in the ways of our daily life we are so
immersed in its operations, that it is hard at first for us to
imagine how momentous was this historical happening
among the Greeks. Steeped as our age is in the ideas of
evolution, we have not yet become accustomed to the idea
that consciousness itself is something that has evolved
through long centuries and that even today, with us, is still
evolving. Only in this century, through modem psychology,
have we learned how precarious a hold consciousness may
exert upon life, and we are more acutely aware therefore
what a precious deal of history, and of effort, was required
for its elaboration, and what creative leaps were necessary
at certain times to extend it beyond its habitual territory.
We have seen the history of philosophy written as social
history, or as economic history, or interpreted from any
number of sociological points of view, but we have yet to
grasp fully the history of philosophy as part of the psychic
evolution of mankind. But of course the concept of evolu¬
tion cannot here be interpreted in the simple and unilinear
fashion of nineteenth-century thought, as in Hegel and
Spencer, but rather in its full concreteness and ambiguity,
as simultaneously gain and loss, advance and regress.

Nothing better illustrates this last point than the Platonic
celebration of reason. The Greeks’ discovery represents an
immense and necessary step forward by mankind, but also
a loss, for the pristine wholeness of man’s being is thereby
sundered or at least pushed into the background. Consider
thus the famous myth of the soul in the Phaedrus: the
driver of the chariot, reason, holds the reins of white steeds
and of black—the white steeds representing the spirited or
emotional part of man, which is more docile to the dictates

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

83

of reason, the black and unruly steeds representing the ap¬
petites or desires, which have to be whipped into line by
the charioteer, Whips and reins convey only the idea of
coercion and restraint; and the charioteer alone wears a hu¬
man face while the rest of man, the non-rational part, is
represented in animal form. Reason, as the divine part of
man, is separated, is indeed of another nature, from the
animal within him . We are a long distance here from an¬
other symbol of light and dark which early mankind, this
time the Chinese, handed down to us: the famous diagram
of the forces of yin and yang, in which the light and the
dark lie down beside each other within the same circle, the
dark area penetrated by a spot of light and the light by a
spot of dark, to symbolize that each must borrow from the
other, that the light has need of the dark, and conversely,
in order for either to be complete. In Plato’s myth first ap¬
pears that cleavage between reason and the irrational that
it has been the long burden of the West to carry, until the
dualism makes itself felt in most violent form within modem
culture.

The same superhuman, or inhuman, exaltation of reason
can be seen in another of the Platonic myths, the celebrated
allegory of the cave in the Republic. The myth begins with
a very grim picture of the human condition as it actually
is: Men sit in the darkness of a cave, in chains, their backs
to the light and able to see only the shadows of objects cast
on the wall they face. One of the prisoners becomes free,
turns around to see the objects of which he had previously
seen only the shadows, and the light itself that casts the
shadows; he may even progress to the mouth of the cave
and see the sun beyond.

This is a myth of man’s progress from darkness to light,
ignorance to knowledge, from dereliction to salvation. As
a young man, we are told, Plato had studied the doctrines
of Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus who had taught that
all things were in flux and that there was no escape any¬
where from death and change; the young Plato, tormented
by this vision, desired at all costs a refuge in the eternal
from the insecurities and ravages of time. Hence the

8 4

IRRATIONAL MAN

enormous attraction for him of the science of mathematics,
which opens up a realm of eternal truths. Here at least, in
pure thought, man can find an escape from time. Hence too
the tremendous emotional force for him of the theory of
eternal forms or Ideas, since these latter were an everlasting
realm to which man has access. We have to see Plato’s
rationalism, not as a cool scientific project such as a later
century of the European Enlightenment might set for itself,
but as a kind of passionately religious doctrine—a theory
that promised man salvation from the things he had feared
most from the earliest days, from death and time. The ex¬
traordinary emphasis Plato put upon reason is itself a reli¬
gious impulse.

Light and darkness are universal human symbols for the
contrasting states of redemption and dereliction. You will
find them in all cultures—in Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and
Christian thought. The sage or saint is always the enlight¬
ened man, he who walks in the light. Plato’s myth, taken
simply as a story, could be adopted by any of these reli¬
gions. The use that Plato makes of it, however, is alto¬
gether his own, and strikingly different from the use any
reh'gion has made of these symbols. For when he has fin¬
ished the story, Plato goes on to explain it as an allegory:
the progress from the cave into the light, in the myth, will
correspond to the actual stages to be followed in the educa¬
tion of the guardians of the state, and the chief content of
this education, its sole content from the age of twenty to
thirty-five, is to be mathematics and dialectic. At this point
we may imagine a great Eastern sage such as Buddha or
Lao-tse looking somewhat askance: the enlightenment they
sought, which was the redemption of the individual, would
not have come through any such severely intellectual and
logical training. And one’s own observation of professional
mathematicians hardly supports the view that they are the
most whole and intact psychological specimens mankind
has to offer. In Plato’s extraordinary emphasis upon mathe¬
matics we see the vestiges of Pythagoreanism, in which
mathematics has been given a sacred, a religious status.

Behind Plato’s emphasis upon mathematics lies his theory

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

85

of Ideas: the “really real” objects in the universe, ta ontos
onta, are the universals or Ideas. Particular things are half
real and half unreal—real only insofar as they participate in
the eternal universals. The universal is fully real because
it is eternal; the fleeting and changing particular has only
a shadowy kind of reality because it passes and is then as
if it had never been. Humanity, the universal, is more real
than any individual man. This is the crucial emphasis of
Platonism as it was passed on to all subsequent philosophy
and that against which contemporary existential philosophy
is in rebellion. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the nineteenth
century were the first to reverse this Platonic scale of values
and to establish the individual, the single one, precisely in
the way in which he is an exception to the universal norm,
as taking precedence over the universal.

Everything else in Plato follows from his identification of
true Being, of “real reality,” with the Ideas. Since art, for
example, deals with the objects of the senses, therefore with
particulars, it deals only with shadows and is itself a form
of untruth. Philosophy and theoretical science have a
higher value than art because in them alone truth is real¬
ized, as it is not in the arts. The earlier meaning of truth,
which embraced also the utterances of the poets, has here
been shifted to make it a purely intellectual concept. Psy¬
chologically speaking, the significance of Plato’s theory of
Ideas is to transfer the weight of emphasis from sensory
reality to a supersensible reality. Perhaps nothing short of
this would have served historically, at that time: For man
to enter history as the rational animal, it was necessary for
him to be convinced that the objects of his reasoning, the
Ideas, were more real than his own individual person or the
particular objects that made up his world. The great step
forward into rationalism required its own mythology—such
perhaps is always the ambiguity of human evolution.

Plato’s thought, as we have seen, values (which means,
finds “really real”) the eternal over the temporal, the uni¬
versal over the particular, reason over the non-rational
other half of man. In all these valuations it is profoundly
anti-existential—a philosophy of essence rather than of exist-

86

IRBATIONAL MAN

ence. Yet it remains existential in its conception of the
activity of philosophizing as fundamentally a means of per¬
sonal salvation. Plato had no conception of metaphysics as
such, as a purely theoretical branch of philosophy devoted
to the study of Being as Being. He was an Athenian to the
end, which means that his interest in political life, the
polis, was the one to which all other human interests were
subordinate. Athens did not produce metaphysicians; these
came rather from other parts of the Greek world, from
Ionia, Milesia, Sicily, southern Italy; and the founder of
metaphysics as a strict and separate discipline was Aristotle,
a native of Stagira in Macedonia. But for Plato, the
Athenian, all metaphysical speculation was simply instru¬
mental in the passionate human search for the ideal state
and the ideal way to live—in short, for a means to the re¬
demption of man. The figure of Socrates as a living human
presence dominates all the earlier dialogues because, for the
young Plato, Socrates the man was the very incarnation of
philosophy as a concrete way of life, a personal calling and
search. It is in this sense too that Kierkegaard, more than
two thousand years later, was to revive the figure of Soc¬
rates—the thinker who lived his thought and was not merely
a professor in an academy—as his precursor in existential
thinking. All of this adds to the richness and ambiguity of
the Platonic writings. But the figure of Socrates himself
undergoes some radical transformations as we follow the
growth and systematization of Plato’s rationalism. In the
earlier, so-called “Socratic,” dialogues the personality of
Socrates is rendered in vivid and dramatic strokes; gradu¬
ally, however, he becomes merely a name, a mouthpiece
for Plato’s increasingly systematic views, and the dialogues
tend toward monologues, mere formal essays. In the Phae-
drus Socrates is still a friend to poets: all the greatest gifts
to man, he tells us, come out of a form of inspired madness,
and the poetic man, haunted by the muses, is ranked near
to the philosopher in the hierarchy of human values. In
The Sophist, however, a late dialogue, the poets are lumped
together in disrepute with the Sophists as traffickers in non-
being, dealers in untruth. The figure of Socrates himself by

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM 87

then has shrunk from a flesh-and-blood person to a shadowy
abstract reasoner. In the later dialogues he even takes a
back seat: the principal figure in The Sophist is the Eleatic
Stranger; in The Laws it is the Athenian Stranger; and in
the Parmenides the venerable figure of Parmenides lectures
Socrates on the intricacies of dialectic. Part of this may be
due simply to fading memory: the Socrates who died in
399 b.c. had stamped himself so strongly on the young
man’s mind that for the next thirty or forty years he vir¬
tually dominated Plato’s life; but with the passage of time
even this vivid figure had to grow fainter and, in uncon¬
scious compensation, Plato had to assert himself at the
end against Socrates. Those unknown figures—the Eleatic
Stranger and the Athenian Stranger—are simply the shadow
of Plato himself, those portions of his personality which had
not been able to speak through the mouth of Socrates but
had at last forced themselves to be recognized. Because of
his meeting with Socrates, Plato had ceased to be a poet,
and finally, at the end of the trail, in his least poetic dia¬
logue, The Laws, he advises the death penalty for those
whose thought opposes the religious orthodoxy of the state
—the very crime for which Socrates had been put to death
by the Athenian orthodoxy and in revolt against which
Plato himself had taken up his own career as a philosopher!
Unconsciously, at the end, he took his revenge upon the
figure that had dominated his life.

When we come to the end, with Aristotle, of the great
historical cycle that began with the pre-Socratics, philoso¬
phy had become a purely theoretical and objective disci¬
pline. The main branches of philosophy, as we know it to¬
day as an academic subject, had been laid out. Wisdom is
identified as Metaphysics, or “First Philosophy,” a detached
and theoretical discipline: the ghost of the existential Soc¬
rates had at last been put to rest. (The progress of this
great historical curve is all the more remarkable if we con¬
sider Aristotle’s own individual development, as it has been
established by Wemer Jaeger: as a young man and still a
Platonist, Aristotle himself conceived of philosophy as the

88

IRRATIONAL MAN

personal and passionate search for redemption from the
wheel of birth and death.) The foundations of the sciences,
as the West has known them, had been laid, and this was
only possible because reason had detached itself from the
mythic, religious, poetic impulses with which it had hith¬
erto been mixed so that it had no distinguishable identity
of its own.

The West has thought in the shadow of the Greeks;
even where later Western thinkers have rebelled against
Greek wisdom, they have thought their rebellion through
in the terms which the Greeks laid down for them. We must
therefore understand Greek rationalism in all its depth and
breadth if we are to understand some of the later revolts
against it, and particularly the modem effort of existential
philosophy at last to think beyond it. The rationalism of the
Greeks was not the mere passing salute to reason that a
present-day orator might toss off before an academic audi¬
ence. The Greeks were thoroughgoing, stringent, and bold
in their thinking—and never more so than when they placed
reason at the top of the human hierarchy. Which is greater,
the artist or the thinker? Is Mozart, the creator of music,
inferior to the physicist Helmholtz, the theorist who ex¬
plained the nature of sound? Which is the higher life—that
of Shakespeare, the greatest poet of the English language,
or of Newton, the greatest English scientist? We today
would hesitate to answer such questions; and in our timid¬
ity we might even reject them as meaningless. Not so the
Greeks. A young Greek who felt a disposition toward both
poetry and theory, and wanted to choose one for a career,
would want to know which was the better life, and Plato
and Aristotle would have made no bones about their reply:
the theoretical life is higher than the life of the artist or
that of the practical man of politics—or of the saint, for that
matter, though they did not yet know of this kind of
existence. In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle gives us a
remarkably flexible and well-rounded picture of human
nature and the many different kinds of goals, or goods, at
which it may aim; but the ethical question still seems un¬
answered for him until he has declared which of all pos-

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

89

sible goods is the best, and in the tenth and final book of
this work he expresses his own preference (stated, of course,
as an objective truth) for the life of pure reason, the life
of the philosopher or theoretical scientist, as the highest
life. Here his own words must be observed carefully:

It would seem, too, that this [Reason] is the true self of
every man, since it is the supreme and better part. It will
be strange, then, if he should choose not his own life,
but some other’s. . . . What is naturally proper to every
creature is the highest and pleasantest for him. And so,
to man, this will be the life of Reason, since Reason is, in
the highest sense, a man’s self. (Eth. Nic. X, 7.)

Reason, Aristotle tells us, is the highest part of our person¬
ality: that which the human person truly is. One’s reason,
then, is one’s real self, the center of one’s personal identity.
This is rationalism stated in its starkest and strongest terms
—that one’s rational self is one’s real self —and as such held
sway over the views of Western philosophers up until very
modem times. Even the Christianity of the Middle Ages,
when it assimilated Aristotle, did not displace this Aristo¬
telian principle: it simply made an uneasy alliance between
faith as the supernatural center of the personality and rea¬
son as its natural center; the natural man remained an
Aristotelian man, a being whose real self was his rational
self.

Aristotle did not have, as Plato did, a realm of eternal
essences, which is alone “really real,” to guarantee the
primacy of reason. Nevertheless, he too found a metaphysi¬
cal ground for this primacy, in the intelligibility of all
Being as it rests on a First Cause. To know, says Aristotle,
is to know the cause, and human reason can ascend to
knowledge of the First Cause of all things, the Unmoved
Mover of the Universe, God. So long as the human intel¬
lect has held out to it the prospect of surveying the whole
cosmos from its ultimate height to its lowest depth, to the
end that it may see the ultimate and sufficient reason why
this cosmos exists and why it exists in the manner it does—
so long as such a goal is promised to the intellect, then all

90

IRRATIONAL MAN

the spectacles afforded by art, all the worldly triumphs of
the practical life, will dwindle by comparison. The value of
art or of the practical life must necessarily be ranked lower
than that of a theoretical vision so complete and all-
encompassing. The connection between theoretical reason
as the highest human function and the possible complete¬
ness of its vision of the cosmos is an intrinsic one: the latter
secures the supreme value of the former. For where the
ultimate reason of things may be known, who would ab¬
stain from the effort to reach it, or be distracted by other
goals which partake of the finitude and incompleteness of
our poor feeble human existence? "Happy is he who can
know the causes of things,” said the Roman poet; and the
happiest man would be he who could know the ultimate
causes of things.

What happens, however, to this view that the highest
man is the theoretical man if we conceive of human exist¬
ence as finite through and through—and if human reason,
and the knowledge it can produce, is seen to be finite like
the rest of man’s being? Then the possibility that the system
of human knowledge may be closed and completed, that all
of Being may be ultimately embraced in one vision, disap¬
pears; and man is left patiently treading the endless road
of knowledge that never reaches conclusion. If science were
to continue its researches uninterruptedly for a thousand
years, it would not disclose to us the ultimate ground of
things. Being finite, we should never arrive at the highest
object of knowledge, God, which this rationalist tradition
has celebrated as the goal that outshines all others. This
conception of human finitude places in question the su¬
premacy that reason has traditionally been given over all
other human functions in the history of Western philoso¬
phy. Theoretical knowledge may indeed be pursued as a
personal passion, or its findings may have practical applica¬
tion; but its value above that of all other human enterprises
(such as art or religion) cannot be enhanced by any claim
that it will reach the Absolute. Suppose, for example, that
there were a road and we were told we ought to walk it;
in response to our question “Why?”, we might be told that

HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM

91

we ought to do so because the walking itself would be
pleasant or useful (good for our health); but if we were
told that there was a priceless treasure at the end of the
road, then the imperative to walk would carry overwhelm¬
ing weight with us. It is this treasure at the end of the road
that has disappeared from the modem horizon, for the sim¬
ple reason that the end of the road has itself disappeared.

Hence, we in our day have to come back to those old,
apparently naive questions of the Greeks from a different
angle, as Nietzsche was the first to do: Which is higher,
science or art? Who is the highest—the theoretical or the
practical man? or the saint? or the artist? The man of faith
or the man of reason? If man can no longer hold before his
mind’s eye the prospect of the Great Chain of Being, a cos¬
mos rationally ordered and accessible from top to bottom
to reason, what goal can philosophers set themselves that
can measure up to the greatness of that old Greek ideal of
the bios theoretikos, the theoretical fife, which has fash¬
ioned the destiny of Western man for millennia?

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

Chapter Five

X. FAITH AND REASON

Though strongly colored by Greek and Neo-Platonic in¬
fluences, Christianity belongs to the Hebraist rather than
to the Hellenist side of man’s nature because Christianity
bases itself above all on faith and sets the man of faith
above the man of reason. Again and again, at the beginning
of Christianity, St. Paul tells us that the faith he preaches
is foolishness to the Greeks, for they demand “wisdom”—
which of course to the Greek meant rational philosophy
and not religious faith. But the historical fact that Christi¬
anity arose in a world which already knew about reason
through the Greeks distinguishes Christian faith from the
Hebraic faith of the Old Testament. Ancient Biblical man
knew the uncertainties and waverings of faith as a matter
of personal experience, but he did not yet know the full
conflict of faith with reason because reason itself did not
come into historical existence until later, with the Greeks.
Christian faith is therefore more intense than that of the
Old Testament, and at the same time paradoxical: it is not
only faith beyond reason but, if need be, against reason.
This problem of the relation between faith and reason,
stated by St. Paul, is not only the root problem for cen¬
turies of Christian philosophers to come, it is the root itself
of later Christian civilization.

The problem is still with us, in our modem civilization,
though naturally it presents itself to us in a very different

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

93

guise than it did to St. Paul. For what is faith? Philosophers
through the centuries have attempted to analyze or de¬
scribe it, but all their talk cannot reproduce mentally the
fact itself. Faith is faith, vital and indescribable. He who
has it knows what it is; and perhaps also he who sin¬
cerely and painfully knows he is without it has some
inkling of what it is, in its absence from a heart that
feels itself dry and shriveled. Faith can no more be de¬
scribed to a thoroughly rational mind than the idea of colors
can be conveyed to a blind man. Fortunately, we are able
to recognize it when we see it in others, as in St. Paul, a
case where faith had taken over the whole personality. Thus
vital and indescribable, faith partakes of the mystery of life
itself. The opposition between faith and reason is that be¬
tween the vital and the rational—and stated in these terms,
the opposition is a crucial problem today. The question is
one of where the center of the h uman personality is to be
located: St. Paul locates this center in faith, Aristotle in
reason; and these two conceptions, worlds apart, show how
at its very fountainhead the Christian understanding of man
diverges utterly from that of Greek philosophy, however
much later thinkers may have tried to straddle this gulf.

From the point of view of reason, any faith, including
the faith in reason itself, is paradoxical, since faith and rea¬
son are fundamentally different functions of the human
psyche. But the paradoxical quality of Christian faith is
further heightened by its specific content: that the Son of
God became man, died, and rose from the dead. On this
matter St. Paul knows that his adversaries are not merely
the Greek philosophers but the faithful Hebrews too. To
the Greeks, he tells us, Christianity is foolishness, to the
Jews a scandal; if the Greeks demand wisdom, the Jews on
the other hand demand a sign—i.e., a definite miraculous
event to show that this Jesus of Nazareth is really the
promised Messiah. Not the Incarnation—that the Infinite
God became finite man, which to Kierkegaard, later, is the
absolute paradox and scandal of Christianity—but the res¬
urrection of Jesus is the overriding article of the faith that
takes possession of Paul’s mind. (It is extremely doubtful,

94

IRRATIONAL MAN

in fact, that there is any clear-cut doctrine of the Incarna¬
tion in St. Paul.) The central fact for his faith is that Jesus
did actually rise from the dead, and so that death itself is
conquered—which is what in the end man most ardently
longs for. The problem of death lies at the center of the
religious consciousness—Unamuno was really following St.
Paul when he argued this—and at the center of much more
of the philosophic consciousness than this consciousness it¬
self realizes. Plato believed in the eternal Ideas because he
was afraid to die. (This is not personal derogation, for the
man who is not afraid to die is not really alive.) And be¬
cause the soul shared in the eternal Ideas, it too could be
eternal, and so the man Plato himself might survive death.
But Paul’s instincts are shrewder: he knows that neither
Platonic nor any other kind of reason can convince us of
immortality; nothing short of a miracle will do—and the
most astounding one at that, a stumbling block to the
skeptical among Greeks and Jews alike. Nowadays we
would say that a miracle like the resurrection merely con¬
tradicts the natural order, whereas the Incarnation contra¬
dicts even logic, but we speak thus looking backward from
the vantage point of Kierkegaard. It was not so in the ear¬
liest Christianity, where faith, more naive and primitive,
came closer to the heart of the matter.

And it was not so more than a century after Paul, with
the Church Father Tertullian (150-225), who is often
cited as an existential precursor of Kierkegaard. Like Kier¬
kegaard, Tertullian was a brilliant intellectual and a power¬
ful writer, who pitted all his power of mind and his rhetoric
against the intellect itself. And like Kierkegaard he too in¬
sists on the absolutely paradoxical quality of the Christian
faith; but notice in the oft-quoted lines of his De Carrie
Christi where he places the weight of emphasis, as the cen¬
tral paradox:

The Son of God was crucified; I am unashamed of it

because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son

of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because

CHRISTIAN SOURCES 95

it is absurd. And He was buried and rose again; the fact

is certain because it is impossible.

Here the parallel with Kierkegaard ends, as all such histori¬
cal parallels between men of vastly different epochs must:
There is no Kierkegaard before Kierkegaard, no Nietzsche
before Nietzsche, and in general nobody before himself
simply because in history nothing individual and great hap¬
pens before it does—before the conditions of its being are
present. Tertullian was a Christian writer at the beginning
of Christianity, when the faith was aggressive, expanding,
conquering; Kierkegaard toward its end, when it was in re¬
treat and half buried under the wave of an advancing
secular civilization.

The violence of the conflict between faith and reason,
which finds expression in anti-rationalism, in a Tertullian,
is mitigated by the time we come to a figure like St.
Augustine (354-430), who is also often cited as an existen¬
tial precursor and is indeed a more consequential one than
Tertullian. The existentialism of St. Augustine lies in his
power as a religious psychologist, as expressed most notably
and dramatically in his Confessions. Augustine had an al¬
most voluptuous sensitivity to the Self in its inner inquie¬
tude, its trembling and frailty, its longing to reach beyond
itself in love; and in the Confessions he gives us a revelation
of subjective experience such as even the greatest Hellenic
literature does not, and could not, because this interioriza-
tion of experience came through Christianity and was un¬
known to the earlier Greeks. Where Plato and Aristotle
had asked the question, What is man?, St. Augustine (in
the Confessions ) asks, Who am I?—and this shift is decisive.
The first question presupposed a world of objects, a fixed
natural and zoological order, in which man was included;
and when man’s precise place in that order had been found,
the specifically differentiating characteristic of reason was
added. Augustine’s question, on the other hand, stems from
an altogether different, more obscure and vital center
within the questioner himself: from an acutely personal
sense of dereliction and loss, rather than from the detach-

IRRATIONAL MAN

96

ment with which reason surveys the world of objects in
order to locate its bearer, man, zoologically within it. Au¬
gustine’s question therefore implies that man cannot be
defined by being located in that natural order, for man, as
the being who asks himself, Who am I?, has already broken
through the barriers of the animal world. Augustine thus
opens the door to an altogether different view of man than
had prevailed in Greek thought.

He opens the door, but he does not really go inside. For
the other side of St. Augustine is Augustine the Neo-
Platonist. As a formal theologian, he was concerned with
the justification of God’s ways to man and particularly a
justification of God’s cosmos; and when he was required
thus to think cosmically, rather than personally, he found
the metaphysics of Plato’s Timaeus and of the Neo-Plato-
nist Plotinus at hand and suited to his purpose. The duality
that gave rise on the one hand to Augustine the existential
lyricist of religious experience and on the other to Augus¬
tine the formal theologian (thinking with the concepts of
Greek metaphysics) is one that lay concealed beneath all
the centuries of medieval philosophy that followed; but it
did not erupt into painful consciousness until the modem
period, when the containing structure of the church, which
had held the conflicting elements together in a kind of sus¬
pension, could no longer serve this purpose.

The opposition or duality in Augustine can be illustrated
on one crucial point: the problem of evil. On page after
page of the Confessions he reveals to us with marvelous
power the presence of the evil and the negative in our
existence; but as a formal theologian, in his Enchiridion (a
manual of theology), he has to make the negative disappear
from that existence or be sublimated into some larger har¬
mony. All evil, he tells us, is a lack of being, hence a form
of non-being; and since the negative is not real, as positive
being is, we are somehow to be consoled. St. Augustine was
here engaged in an effort at theodicy, a justification of the
goodness of God’s cosmos; after Augustine, theodicy was
the central project of all Christian metaphysicians, down
through Leibniz and Hegel. Leibniz’s cosmic optimism

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

97

came to its comic end in the Dr. Pangloss of Voltaire’s
Candide, Hegel’s in the existential revolt of Kierkegaard.
Hegel is the end of the line because once the spirit of exis¬
tential revolt has entered the modem world we are forced
to take the side of Ivan Karamazov, who says that he “has
to decline the ticket”—the ticket of admission to a cosmos
where so much evil has to exist as the necessary precondi¬
tion of good. Similarly, we are forced today to take the side
of Augustine’s Confessions against his Enchiridion because
we recognize theodicy for what it is, the tragicomedy of
rationalism in extremis. Theodicy is an attempt to deal
with God as a metaphysical object, to reason demonstra¬
tively about Him and His cosmos, to the end that the per¬
fection of both emerges as a rational certainty. Behind this
lies the human need to seek security in a world where man
feels homeless. But reason cannot give that security; if it
could, faith would be neither necessary nor so difficult. In
the age-old struggle between the rational and the vital, the
modem revolt against theodicy (or, equally, the modem
recognition of its impossibility) is on the side of the vital,
since it alone holds firm to those inexpugnable elements of
our existence that Augustine described in his Confessions,
but then as metaphysician attempted to think away.

St. Augustine saw faith and reason—the vital and the
rational—as coming together in eventual harmony; and in
this too he set the pattern of Christian thought for the thou¬
sand years of the Middle Ages that were to follow. The
formula after Augustine became “Faith seeking understand¬
ing”: that is, faith taken as a datum, a given fact within
the individual’s existence, then seeking to elaborate itself
rationally as far as it can. In a Neo-Platonic cosmos it was
easy for faith to seek its own understanding, for that cosmos
itself, though the philosophers themselves did not know it,
rested on a faith: given a universe through which God al¬
ready radiated as an infin ite sun, one could find analogies
and simulacra everywhere to the dogmas of faith. If one
could not prove the dogma of the Trinity, one could at least
show likenesses to the Trinity everywhere in nature and
man. This made the dogma more plausible, even if in its

98

IRRATIONAL MAN

intimate nature it remained a mystery to reason. That such
a dogma absolutely contradicts reason was something the
medieval philosophers never perceived or acknowledged.
Faith, contrary to Tertullian, had become faith beyond
reason, but never against, or in spite of it. On the whole,
throughout the Middle Ages the position of reason—and this
in itself may seem a paradox—remained unassailable.

The consolidation of the Chinch, institutionally and dog¬
matically, helped in this. As the Church enunciated its
faith in article after article of dogma, the medieval philoso¬
pher was left free to be as rational as he wished, since the
non-rational part of him was contained and expressed in the
structure of the Church and could thus take care of itself.
Secular historians have often represented the medieval
Church as placing a galling restraint upon the free intel¬
ligence of medieval thinkers. This is undoubtedly true from
the point of view of the modem secular mind (to which,
by the way, there was no counterpart in that earlier pe¬
riod); but it is not at all the way in which the medieval
thinkers themselves felt about the dogmas of their faith.
These dogmas were experienced as the vital psychic fluid
in which reason itself moved and operated and were thus
its secret wellspring and support. It remained for later
Protestant philosophers, like Kant, to experience the fateful,
but necessary, split between reason and dogma, in such a
way that Kant can point out that the traditional proofs of
the existence of God really rest on an unconscious faith.
What the medieval thinker often took to be reason was in
fact faith; and the error occurred not because of a deficiency
in logical acumen on the part of those thinkers, but be¬
cause their reason itself was rooted in their historical exist¬
ence—the existence, in short, of an Age of Faith.

From time to time, of course, there were rumblings of
discord within the medieval harmony. The tension between
the vital and the rational in man involves such a delicate
balance that it can split apart into open warfare even where
man is totally contained in a universal Church. The in¬
stincts of man are so earth-bound that they shrewdly sense
it whenever the approach of logic threatens them. And so

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

99

we find in the eleventh century, the age of naive and beau¬
tiful Romanesque art, when the logical works of Aristotle
were just beginning to circulate in the West, a violent con¬
troversy ensuing between “theologians” and “dialecticians.”
The theologians were the spokesmen for faith, the dialecti¬
cians for logic. It was once again the old conflict between
faith and reason, but this time sharpened by the sense of
a naive and rude age that the very coming of reason was it¬
self a threat. The most remarkable figure in the controversy
was Peter Damiani (1007-1072), the most forceful spokes¬
man for the party of the theologians, who attacked the
exaltation of grammar and logic (what nowadays we would
call semantics) as the temptation of the Devil. The Devil
in fact, Damiani says, was the first grammarian, tempting
Adam in the Garden of Eden with the promise “Ye shall
be as gods,” and thus teaching him to decline the word
“God” in the plural. Logic is quite useless, according to this
theologian, in helping us to know God because God in His
nature is so incomprehensible and omnipotent that He
transcends the basic law of logic, the principle of contradic¬
tion; God can even abolish the past, make what has hap¬
pened not to have happened. Logic is a man-made tool,
and God cannot be measured according to its requirements.
We are not far here from the later protest of Pascal: “Not
the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob.”

The enlightenment went on, nevertheless, despite such
rumblings; and Greek reason, in the form of the works of
Aristotle, became known more and more in the West. It
took prodigious labors on the part of the philosophers of
the twelfth and thirteenth centimes to effect the final medi¬
eval concordat between faith and reason. The moment of
synthesis, when it came in the thirteenth and early four¬
teenth centuries, produced a civilization perhaps as beau¬
tiful as any man has ever forged, but like all mortal beauty
a creature of time and insecurity. The fact that the philoso¬
phers had to labor so prodigiously in bridging the gap
should show us how delicate is the balance between the
vital and the rational, and that no harmony between them

100

IRRATIONAL. MAN

can be acquired ready-made. The medieval harmony was
achieved at a price: In the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas
(i225?-i274?), the crowning work of the synthesis, man
is—to use Bernard Groethuysen’s image—really a centaur, a
being divided between the natural and theological orders.
In the natural order Thomistic man is Aristotelian—a crea¬
ture whose center is reason and whose substantial form is
the rational soul; and St. Thomas, the Christian, never bats
an eye in commenting upon the passage in Aristotle’s
Ethics which states flatly that reason is our true and real
self, the center of our personal identity, but merely ex¬
pounds it in straightforward agreement. This might be
excused as simply the pedagogic exposition of a teacher
identifying himself with his text; but in the Summa Theo-
logica he repeats that the speculative, or theoretical, intel¬
lect is the highest function of man, that to which all the
others are subordinate. This rational animal in the natural
order is subordinated, to be sure, to the supernatural; but
again through an intellectual vision—the final one, of the
essence of God—which informs and purifies the will. This is
a synthesis indeed, but how far we have traveled from the
experience of Biblical man or of the early Christian, whose
faith was felt as something that pierced the bowels and the
belly of a man’s spirit!

And despite the synthesis, despite the fact that philoso¬
phers in this epoch had come to live with the assumption
that faith and reason agree, the ancient problem of the re¬
lation between the vital and the rational still did not dis¬
appear; it simply went underground and popped its head
up elsewhere: this time in the controversy between Volun¬
tarism and Intellectualism. After St. Thomas, Duns Scotus
(1265?—1308) and his followers advocated a doctrine that
went contrary to the Thomists—that of the primacy of the
will over the intellect. In an age of unbounded rationalism
(among the philosophers, that is: the actual concrete life
of the time was far from that), such a doctrine was the
faint but remembered echo of primitive Christianity’s cry
as voiced by St. Paul when he said that he came not to
bring wisdom to the philosophers but a saving will to all

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101

mankind. Scotus, a Franciscan and therefore an Augustin-
ian, was also remembering the existential voice of St.
Augustine’s Confessions.

St. Thomas, the Intellectualist, had argued that the in¬
tellect in man is prior to the will because the intellect
determines the will, since we can desire only what we know.
Scotus, the Voluntarist, replied that the will determines
what ideas the intellect turns to, and thus in the end de¬
termines what the intellect comes to know. Put this way,
the problem looks as insoluble as which came first the
chicken or the egg. And indeed this matter of the primacy
of intellect or will is one of the oldest and most vexing ques¬
tions in philosophy—it is the issue behind Socrates’ perpet¬
ual query whether virtue is really knowledge and therefore
all the perversities of the will merely forms of ignorance.
The question has perhaps to be put differently: not in terms
of whether will is to be given primacy over the intellect, or
the intellect over the will—these functions being after all but
abstract fragments of the total man—but rather in terms of
the primacy of the thinker over his thoughts, of the concrete
and total man himself who is doing the thinking. At least
Voluntarism seems to be aware that it is the heart which
pumps blood to the brain, and so its own heart is rather in
the right place; however excessive or extreme the various
voluntarisms have been in the history of philosophy, the
fact remains that Voluntarism has always been, in intention
at least, an effort to go beyond the thought to the concrete
existence of the thinker who is thinking that thought.

2. EXISTENCE VS. ESSENCE

Contemporary Thomists would not accept this compari¬
son between Duns Scotus and St. Thomas because they are
just now in the process of discovering St. Thomas as the
true and authentic existentialist. When Existentialism first
appeared on the scene in France, M. Jacques Maritain was
scathing and peevish in his denunciation of it, but then later
announced that all it contained had been said already in

102

IRRATIONAL MAN

the thirteenth century by St. Thomas. Imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery!

In fact, the issues between Aquinas and Scotus are com¬
plicated by another profound and technical problem: the
relation between essence and existence. And to shed some
light on this problem we shall have to anticipate a little
what will be given more extended treatment later.

The essence of a thing is what the thing is; existence re¬
fers rather to the sheer fact that the thing is. Thus when I
say “I am a man,” the “I am” denotes the fact that I exist,
while the predicate “man” denotes what kind of existent I
am, namely a man.

Modem Existentialism, particularly in the writings of
Sartre, has made much of the thesis: existence precedes es¬
sence. In the case of man, its meaning is not difficult to
grasp. Man exists and makes himself to be what he is; his
individual essence or nature comes to be out of his existence;
and in this sense it is proper to say that existence precedes
essence. Man does not have a fixed essence that is handed
to him ready-made; rather, he makes his own nature out
of his freedom and the historical conditions in which he is
placed. As Ortega y Gasset puts it, man has no nature, only
a history. This is one of the chief respects in which man
differs from things, which do have fixed natures or essences,
which are once and for all what they are. However dif¬
ferently the various Existentialists may put this thesis, they
are all agreed on it as a cardinal point in their analysis of
man. Sartre proclaims the point as applying, be it noted,
only to the case of man; it is only with man that it seems
to him to have any significance. Whether or not existence
precedes essence in things generally—in the stone, the tree,
or a table—or whether the reverse is true is a question that
would hardly seem to matter very much, since a thing at
any moment is always precisely what it is, and it would not
make much sense to raise the question when existence and
essence exactly coincide.

In the history of philosophy, however, the question has
been raised not only for man but for all beings. The problem
breaks down into two separate but related questions: (i)

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

103

Does existence have primacy over essence, or the reverse?
and (2) In actual existing things is there a real distinc¬
tion between the two? Or are they merely different points
of view that the mind takes toward the same existing thing?

The reader may wonder whether questions that sound as
abstract and remote as these have any real flesh-and-blood
import at all. But its technicality alone need not make a
question irrelevant to life, if the technicality results from
carrying a question that is indeed one of life and death, as
the phrase goes, to the farthest reaches of thought. These
two questions touch upon the most fundamental matters
of philosophy, and indeed the whole history of Western
philosophy revolves around the answers that have been
given to them. How one answers them determines one’s
view of one’s own life and the life of nature. A glance back
at Plato, the father of Western philosophy, will show us
the human consequences of the answers to these questions.

Essences Plato called Ideas. These Ideas, as we saw in
the previous chapter, were for him “really real,” more real
than the particular things that derived their own individual
being from participation in the Ideas. The circle, that is,
about which the geometrician reasons is the essence com¬
mon to every individual circle in nature, and without which
the individual circles could not exist; it is more real than
the individual circle that he may draw on the blackboard
for illustration. Now, the circle that the mathematician
reasons about is one he never draws upon the blackboard; it
cannot be drawn because it never comes into existence; it
is outside time and therefore eternal. So too it never comes
to be in actual physical space; and it is non-spatial in the
same sense in which it is non-temporal. All the Ideas, for
Plato, thus constitute a realm of absolute realities beyond
time, change, and existence, and existence is merely a
shadowy replica of essence. When an Idea comes into
existence, it is through a fall (a kind of original sin) from
some higher realm of Being. Time itself—that invisible and
tormenting medium of our own individual existence—be¬
comes merely a shadowy image of eternity.

It requires very little imagination to see how, holding

104 IRRATIONAL MAN

such a philosophic position, one’s attitudes toward life be¬
come colored all the way down the line by the Platonic
bias. All of Plato’s writings, the whole of his philosophy,
are in fact a working out of the consequences of this funda¬
mental conviction of the priority of essence over existence
for every field of human experience: for government, ethics,
aesthetics; even extending down to the condemnation of the
life of the body. Whatever we may think of it, throughout
the centuries Platonism has exercised a powerful influence
upon the imaginations and fives of men, and in view of the
miraculous fertility of that influence we cannot say that the
question of existence versus essence is an idle one, or that
it is remote from the concerns of fife.

Plato’s is the classic and indeed archetypal expression of
a philosophy which we may now call essentialism, which
holds that essence is prior in reality to existence. Existen¬
tialism, by contrast, is the philosophy that holds existence
to be prior to essence. The history of Western philosophy
has been one long conflict, sometimes explicit but more
often hidden and veiled, between essentialism and existen¬
tialism. And it would seem also to be the case that, to the
degree to which this history takes its beginnings from Plato,
essentialism has always come out on top. This may not be
due altogether to the compelling influence of Plato; it may
also be due to the very nature of philosophy itself, to the
hidden tendency of human reason. We shall have more to
say on this question later.

With the foregoing distinctions perhaps a little clearer,
let us return now to the point in history where we left mat¬
ters between St. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.

On the question of existence in relation to essence it
would seem that St. Thomas is the existentialist. He held
that existence is prior to essence in the sense that what pri¬
marily constitutes the being of anything is its act of existing
(actus essendi). Moreover, he said, in all created things—
all things except God that ultimately derive their existence
from God—there is a real difference between the thing’s ex¬
istence and its essence. I am not my essence, since if I were
—if essence and existence were identical in me—it would be

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

105

of my essence to exist, and I would never die. For all con¬
tingent beings, beings that are bom and that die, existence
therefore can never coincide with essence. There is within
the being of contingent things a hiatus or cleft, as it were,
between existence and essence.

Duns Scotus, on the other hand, maintained the primacy
of essence over existence. In the matter of the order of the
attributes of God, at any rate, he set God’s essence first as
the basic attribute, and His existence after it. To be sure,
it might be argued by the Scotist that since God’s being is
absolutely one and undivided, in contrast to the complexity
and self-dividedness that we find among the things of na¬
ture, it does not make much difference whether we assign
to essence or existence the status of primary attribute be¬
cause the two words as applied to God designate the very
same thing—God Himself. The order of the divine predi¬
cates would thus seem to be merely a matter of verbal
arrangement. But this arrangement does show the philo¬
sophic cast of mind of the arranger; and even though the
attributes in this case denote the same reality in the thing,
he who puts essence first, and on grounds of strictest philo¬
sophic principle, does so because he considers it more basic
than existence. In this respect the Scotist philosophy was
certainly more essentialistic than that of St. Thomas.

With regard to the second of our questions—whether ex¬
istence and essence in actually existing things are really dis¬
tinct—Dims Scotus also held a position different from the
Thomist one: There is, Scotus says, no real distinction be¬
tween the essence and existence of a thing, as St. Thomas
had maintained; the two are but different ways in which
the mind lays hold of the existing thing.

This question of the identity of essence and existence is
one of the most tangled in the history of Scholastic philoso¬
phy, and it is still hotly debated between two schools of
Catholic philosophers, the Jesuits and the Dominicans.
After Scotus, in the sixteenth century, the great Spanish
theologian Francis Suarez—really the last voice of medieval
Scholasticism—upheld the Scotist position on the question.
Suarez became the great philosophical teacher for the Jes-

106 IRRATIONAL MAN

uits, and indeed the interpreter par excellence for them of
what St. Thomas was supposed to have meant. Hence
the continuing, and even contemporary, debate between
Suarezians and Thomists (Dominicans), a controversy that
is relevant in that the issue still being debated throws an
unexpected and clarifying light on the whole of modem
thought.

Much of this light comes from a remarkable, even great,
book, Being and Some Philosophers, by the distinguished
scholar of medieval philosophy, Etienne Gilson. Whether or
not we agree with him that all existential roads lead to
Rome—or, more exactly, to the Paris of the thirteenth cen¬
tury where St. Thomas taught his doctrine of the priority
of existence—Gilson has presented a marvelous analysis of
the way in which the Scotist influence worked upon the
great philosophers of the seventeenth century, Descartes,
Spinoza, and Leibniz, and through them has permeated
the thinking of the last three centuries. Descartes, Spinoza,
and Leibniz were all philosophers with a pronounced
mathematical bent, and therefore it was likely that they
should find congenial a philosophy that exalted essence
over existence. The mathematician is enthralled by the
timeless self-identity of essences, and hence always gravi¬
tates spontaneously to one form of Platonism or another.
Moreover, the seventeenth century and those following it
were concerned with the extraordinary expansion of mathe¬
matics and mathematical physics, and these two disciplines
won prestige beyond that of every other intellectual enter¬
prise because of the extraordinary conquests over nature
they made possible: hence this bias toward essence with
which the contemporary era in philosophy began continued
supreme and in fact almost unchallenged until Kierkegaard
appeared in the nineteenth century. The roots of a thing
always go deeper into the soil than our vision of the plant
above the surface would lead us to imagine; and in this
case it comes as something of a surprise to know that one
fateful direction of modem thought had its roots in the
disputes of theologians in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

107

Modem Catholic philosophers, to whom we alluded ear¬
lier, have made a great deal of St. Thomas as representing
the original and true form of what a Christian existentialism
should be, an assumption enabling some Thomists to as¬
sume a rather papal and condescending attitude toward
modem Existentialism as toward a degenerate scion. The
existentialism of St. Thomas, however, is extremely debata¬
ble; and one faithful son of the Church, Miguel Unamuno
—whose testimony should carry as much weight initially as
any medieval scholar’s, since he was at once a scholar and
poet—has rejected the mentality of St. Thomas as expressed
in the Summae as being purely legalistic. The Summae
plead a case, says Unamuno, they buttress the Church as
an institution, in the way that the old codifications of
Roman law buttressed an empire; and in this respect we
must remember how much of the spirit of the old Roman
Empire the medieval Church had inherited. A good deal of
the Thomistic existentialism current nowadays looks indeed
like a case of special pleading after the fact. A book like
Gilson’s, for example, shows so strongly the influence of
Kierkegaard (albeit at work on a mind that is granitically
Thomist) that it is safe to say the book could not have been
written if Kierkegaard had not lived. Without Kierkegaard,
indeed, Gilson would not have found in St. Thomas what
he does manage to dig out, and the fact is that a good
many other Thomists found quite different things before
the influence of Kierkegaard made itself felt. And, to go
one step further, what Gilson finds is not enough. The his¬
toricity of truth is inescapable, however perennial the prob¬
lems of philosophy may be, and we should be suspicious
in advance of any claim that the answer to modem prob¬
lems is to be found in the thirteenth century. Granting St.
Thomas’ thesis of the primacy of existence and of the real
distinction between existence and essence, we are still very
far from an answer to those questions which have led mod¬
em thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre to a reopening of
the whole subject of Being.

The fact is that the Thomistic distinction between essence
and existence leads us into very grave embarrassment when

io8

IRRATIONAL MAN

we try to understand our own human existence as men. In
his treatise On Being and Essence {De Ente et Essentia)
St. Thomas cites as an example of essence the traditional
definition, “Man is a rational animal.” This essence is the
common characteristic of a whole species. A question then
arises, and it is the famous question of universals: How
does this essence, which is one as a species, exist as a plu¬
rality of individual members of the species? This essence is
particularized in each individual: my rational-animality is
mine, as distinctly my own and different from that of my
friend Peter as my flesh and blood are mine and not his. In
fact according to St. Thomas it is my individual matter, my
flesh and blood, that individuates the universal essence.
“Signate matter,” Aquinas calls it, and he describes it as
matter that exists in determinate dimensions—that is, it is
just this particular matter of mine that fills this space which
I am now occupying and that excludes any other solid body
from filling the same space. Now it is precisely here that
the difficulty arises that begets that classical view we re¬
ferred to earlier of man as a centaur, irremediably split be¬
tween two parts of his being; here he is divided between
the essence and the individuating matter that locates his
body uniquely in space and time. The characteristics or
qualities that inhere in this individual matter St. Thomas
calls “accidents,” since they are not a necessary part of the
essence. But what, we may ask, in the case of any individual
human being is the accident and what is the essence? Is it at
all clear that in that singular and internal biography of our
own selves from birth to death there is a compartment into
which certain happenings and characteristics are dumped
as being accidental, while in another compartment are
other characteristics and events considered as essential? Or,
more precisely, are the qualities of here and now—the tem¬
poral and spatial qualities that are accorded to me in virtue
of that matter which individuates the essence—accidental
to my being as a human person?

If I turn a candid gaze “to the things themselves,” as
Husserl would say, toward my own individual existence as
it has been my actual care and concern through life, quite

CHRISTIAN SOURCES log

apart now from any metaphysical presuppositions what¬
ever, can I say that the fact that I exist here and now, rather
than there and then, is an accident of my being? I was
bom and have lived an American in the twentieth century.
From the point of view of an essence of man that exists
individually in me but is nevertheless really distinct from
my existence, such facts are indeed accidents; but they
have formed the burdens and tasks of my life, and there is
not a part of its warp and woof into which they have not
entered. Or, let us take the example of which Sartre has at
once properly and improperly made a great deal: the fact
of human sexuality. Is the individual’s sexuality part of the
essence of his existence or only an accident? I cannot, in
introspection, imagine myself harboring any essence, like a
nugget at the center of a nest of Chinese boxes, that is not
touched by the fact that my life has been lived from birth
as a member of one sex and not of the other. The argument
applies to all the factual conditions of man’s being—man’s
facticity, as Sartre calls it: if we exist our facticity, then we
are it, and it makes up the total essence of what we
are. These factual conditions, particularly of the historical
epoch in which we live, color every portion of our being.
Existence and essence, as we take them at any rate in the
actual life of the human person, interpenetrate.

The Scotist thesis of the identity of essence and existence
would seem then to do more justice to the actual facts of
our experience. But, on the other hand, the Thomistic ar¬
guments work very well against this position, which ends
up by making existence itself a kind of “accident” that oc¬
curs to essence. Moreover, with this view it becomes diffi¬
cult to explain the radical contingency of the human being,
since if the essence and existence of the actually existing
person are identical, why should his existence not therefore
be necessary so that he lives forever?

But if neither of these medieval positions works, if there
is neither an identity of essence and existence nor a real
distinction between them, what then?

The fact is that neither position can work because the
very notions with which they deal are too abstract and

110

IRHAT10NAL MAN

schematic. The medieval conceptions of essence and exist¬
ence do not do justice to the full concreteness of modem
experience, particularly to our experience of man himself.
They need a complete overhauling. That is why Heidegger
announced that it was necessary for these questions about
Being to be renewed, and he has been the first philosopher
to attempt a radical rethinking of the tradition itself. A
tradition is kept alive only by such renewal, not by me¬
chanical and idle parroting of the formulae it has be¬
queathed to the present. But renewal really means renewal,
and is therefore a very radical adventure. We should not
be surprised therefore that though modem Existentialism,
to the degree that it moves in the mainstream of Western
thought, inevitably harks back to traditional problems, it
nevertheless comes up with conclusions that are bound to
shock some of the traditionalists. Time, alas, is of our es¬
sence; and our mere recognition of this fact—a recognition
that was altogether beyond the anhistorical medieval man—
is so radical that it creates a gulf between us and the me¬
dieval past. The solutions of that past can never be totally
ours, marvelous as we have come to realize its philosophy
as having been.

3 . THE CASE OF PASCAL

However numerous these antecedents and precursors,
what we know today as Existentialism could not have come
to be before the conditions of its being were there. Philoso¬
phers breed ideas; and if anything keeps them anchored to
existence, it is not philosophy itself but something that
comes from outside it—either religion, or the personal
drama, anguish, or rebellion of the philosopher’s own life.
So in the past it was the dynamite of Hebraism or Christian¬
ity that blew to bits the classical temple of Greek rational¬
ism. Before even the possibility of modem Existentialism
could be created it was necessary to create its world, and
this could have come about only through science, which
suddenly projected man out of the Middle Ages. So when

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

111

we come to Pascal (1623-1662), himself a great scientist,
we axe no longer dealing, as in the case of St. Augus¬
tine, with a precursor of Existentialism. Pascal is an exis¬
tentialist.

Nothing could be more confusing than the indifferent
lumping together of Pascal and St. Augustine as great psy¬
chologists of religion. To be sure, they were both concerned
with the inner life of the religious man, his anguish and
restlessness. But the world St. Augustine inhabited was the
Neo-Platonic cosmos, a luminous crystal palace with the
superessential Good fixed on its highest point, radiating out¬
ward like a beacon and diminishing in brilliance as it shone
down through the rest of the perfect structure. Pascal’s was
the desolate and desiccated world of modern science, where
at night the sage hears not the music of the shining heavenly
bodies but only the soundless emptiness of space. “The si¬
lence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” Pascal said,
voicing the reaction of the human heart to the universe that
seventeenth-century science had fabricated for man. In
that world of frightful and empty space man was homeless.
Accordingly, he evolved a different image of himself from
that of the man who inhabited—and beh'eved himself at
home in—a Greek or Neo-Platonic cosmos. In the world of
Pascal, faith itself became a much more desperate gamble
and a much more daring leap.

Consequently, the struggle between faith and reason
gave rise to a more profound psychological discord within
man’s being. Despite the arguments of theologians during
the Middle Ages about matters of faith and reason, those
ages never experienced this division of man within himself.
In the Divine Comedy, Dante is led by Virgil, the symbol
of human reason, through the depths of Hell and up the
slopes of Purgatory; but when it comes to the journey
through Heaven, the sphere of the elect who have made it
there only by God’s grace, Virgil disappears and Beatrice,
symbol of Divine Revelation, takes over as guide. Reason,
in short, guides us to faith, and faith takes over where rea¬
son leaves off—such is the happy and harmonious lot of man
in the ordered, crystalline cosmos of Dante. But the universe

112

IRRATIONAL MAN

of Pascal does not present us with the numerous similitudes
and analogies to the Divine Being on which the medieval
philosophers had hung their faith, as on so many pegs. In
Pascal’s universe one has to search much more desperately
to find any signposts that would lead the mind in the di¬
rection of faith. And where Pascal finds such a signpost,
significantly enough, is in the radically miserable condition
of man himself. How is it that this creature who shows ev¬
erywhere, in comparison with other animals and with na¬
ture itself, such evident marks of grandeur and power is at
the same time so feeble and miserable? We can only con¬
clude, Pascal says, that man is rather like a ruined or dis¬
inherited nobleman cast out from the kingdom which ought
to have been his. Thus he takes as his fundamental premise
the image of man as a disinh erited being.

Consequently, the psychology of a Pascal will be differ¬
ent from that of a St. Augustine. Pascal’s observations of
the human condition are among the most “negative” that
have ever been made. Readers of Sartre who have protested
that his psychology is too morbid or sordid, and possibly
therefore only an expression of the contemporary Paris
school of despair, would do well to look into Pascal: they
will find his view of our ordinary human lot every bit as
mordant and clinical as Sartre’s. “The natural misfortune
of our mortal and feeble condition,” Pascal says, “is so
wretched that when we consider it closely, nothing can con¬
sole us.” Men escape from considering it closely by means
of the two sovereign anodynes of “habit” and “diversion.”
Man chases a bouncing ball or rides to hounds after a flee¬
ing animal; or the ball and fleeing game are pursued
through the labyrinth of social intrigue and amusement;
anything, so long as he manages to escape from himself. Or,
solidly ensconced in habit the good citizen, surrounded by
wife and family, secure in his job, need not cast his eye on
the quality of his days as they pass, and see how each day
entombs some hope or dream forgotten and how the next
morning wakes him to a round that becomes ever narrower
and more congealed. Both habit and diversion, so long as
they work, conceal from man “his nothingness, his forlorn-

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

113

ness, his inadequacy, his impotence and his emptiness.”
Religion is the only possible cure for this desperate malady
that is nothing other than our ordinary mortal existence it¬
self.

Where classical philosophers discuss the nature of man
—as Aristotle does in his Ethics or St. Thomas in his treatise
on man in the second part of the S umma Theologica—such
talk seems to us nowadays to smack of the textbook: the
creature the thinkers are discussing may be man, but he
does not resemble us in the least. In what Pascal says about
the human condition, however, we recognize ourselves all
too painfully. As a psychologist, he is a contemporary.

Perhaps Pascal was a better psychologist than were the
philosophers because he himself was no philosopher. He
has left us in one brief remark his final judgment of the
value of philosophy itself: it is, he tells us, “not worth an
hoiu’s trouble.” And considering the quality of Pascal’s
mind and his deepest interests as a man, this is an entirely
reasonable judgment. To put it somewhat paradoxically, he
was too intelligent to be a professional philosopher. To have
put himself through the slow and laborious course of train¬
ing in any academic philosophy would have been to hobble
dreadfully his marvelous intelligence, and in any case it was
unnecessary for him to do so in order to know what he ul¬
timately needed to know as a man. In this respect he re¬
sembles Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophers who went
beyond philosophy and so were able to see how it looked
from the outside, from the point of view of religion and
art, in their cases, from that of science, in his. Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche did possess a technical grounding in philoso¬
phy, however, while Pascal’s education was scientific and
humanistic. He had read some of the classical philosophers,
like the Stoics, but apparently only to find out what they
had to say about the condition of man and not to follow
their metaphysics, for which he had very little taste. His
passionate interest as a youth was in science, and he was
one of the most precocious scientific geniuses that ever
lived, making fundamental discoveries in mathematics be¬
fore he was twenty-one.

ii4

IRRATIONAL MAN

After the death of his father, Pascal, still a young man,
came into a fairly comfortable inheritance and was able to
cut something of a figure in the world. We know, at any
rate, that he kept for a while a coach-and-six, which was
enough to establish him as a gentleman and man of the
world. In order to understand the mind of Pascal we have
to imagine him entering that social world of Paris in the
reign of Louis XIV, when the observation and study of man
was the consuming passion of worldly and acute minds like
Saint-Simon and La Rochefoucauld, and recognizing that
here was a different kind of datum from that he had dealt
with in his mathematical and physical researches. And not
only was the material different, but it required an altogether
different kind of intelligence for its comprehension. Pascal,
unlik e Spinoza, was too intelligent not to recognize that do¬
ing geometry was altogether different from doing the study
of man.

Out of this realization came his famous distinction be¬
tween the mathematical and the intuitive mind— l’esprit de
geometrie and Vesprit de finesse. It would not be too much
of an exaggeration to say that the whole of Bergson’s phi¬
losophy is virtually contained in the few pages that Pascal
dedicates to this fundamental distinction. French culture
has in these matters a marvelous sense of conservation. The
most inbred of cultures, it is nevertheless among the richest
because it preserves and elaborates what it has in its own
kitchen. (This is also the spirit of French cooking, which
does not throw away anything but uses it to create a stock—
the fundamental element in cooking, Escoffier tells us—or
else to throw into a pot au feu that can be kept simmering
indefinitely.) Because it kept sight of Pascal’s distinction,
French culture never quite surrendered itself to the clear
and distinct ideas of Descartes. Now, the mathematical
mind, as Pascal describes it, is defined precisely by its pre¬
occupation with clear and distinct ideas, from which it is
able to extract by deduction an infinite number of logical
consequences. But the material with which the intuitive
mind is dealing is so concrete and complex that it cannot
be reduced to clear and distinct ideas that can be set forth

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

115

in a few simple axioms. In a human situation the waters are
usually muddy and the air a little foggy; and whatever the
intuitive person—whether he be a politician, courtier, or
lover—can perceive in that situation is not by virtue of well-
defined logical ideas. Quite the contrary: such ideas are
more likely than not to impede his vision. What Pascal had
really seen, then, in order to have arrived at this distinction
was this: that man himself is a creature of contradictions
and ambivalences such as pure logic can never grasp. This
was something the philosophers had not yet grasped.

By delimiting a sphere of intuition over against that
of logic, Pascal had of course set limits to human reason.
Perhaps nowhere did he use his own esprit de finesse more
shrewdly than in his estimate of the value of reason, and
perhaps no writer has ever balanced more judiciously the
claims and counterclaims of reason: As a mathematical
genius he had known all the power and glory of reason,
but he also saw its corresponding feebleness and limita¬
tions. Three centuries before Heidegger showed, through a
learned and laborious exegesis, that Kants doctrine of the
limitations of human reason really rests on the finitude of
our human existence, Pascal clearly saw that the feebleness
of our reason is part and parcel of the feebleness of our
human condition generally. Above all, reason does not get
at the heart of religious experience. As Pascal had very little
use for formal philosophy, so he had even less for formal
or rational theology, whose supreme task is the fabrication
of rational proofs for the existence of God. Such proofs,
Pascal held, are beside the point: one day they seem valid
to us, the next day not, and if we postpone our salvation
until the proofs are satisfactory we shall stand forever
wavering from one foot to the other. There are today, Pas¬
cal said, extremely intelligent minds who find the proofs for
the existence of God entirely convincing, and equally intel¬
ligent minds that find them misconceived or inconclusive;
and each side suspects the other of bad faith. But the fact
is that the proofs convince those who want to be convinced,
fail to convince those who do not want to be convinced,
and so are not really proofs at all. In any case, God as the

n6

IRRATIONAL MAN

object of a rigorous demonstration, even supposing such a
demonstration were forthcoming, would have nothing to do
with the living needs of religion. He would become as neu¬
tral an entity as the abstract circle or triangle about which
geometricians reason. It is here that Pascal raises his famous
outcry; “Not the God of the philosophers, but the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

He himself had had a religious experience, connected
with what he thought to be a miraculous recovery from an
illness, and so overpowering had been the visitation that he
wrote down a note about the experience and sewed it into
his clothing, as if it were a secret that he had to keep as
close as possible to himself and never forget. Whatever we
may think of the validity of such experiences, for Pascal
himself this lightning from heaven needed no proofs; it was
of the order of life itself, not of rational theology. His life
thereafter turned round that single and shattering experi¬
ence, and he dedicated that life to religion; particularly to
an attempt at a great explanation and defense of the Chris¬
tian religion, which he never completed and of which we
have only those glorious ruins, the Pensees. Another equally
drastic experience, this time rather negative than positive,
was equally decisive for his thinking. While he was driving
by the Seine one day, his carriage suddenly swerved, the
door was flung open, and Pascal almost catapulted down
the embankment to his death. The arbitrariness and sud¬
denness of this near accident became for him another light¬
ning flash of revelation. Thereafter he saw Nothingness as
a possibility that lurked, so to speak, beneath our feet, a
gulf and an abyss into which we might tumble at any mo¬
ment. No other writer has expressed more powerfully than
Pascal the radical contingency that lies at the heart of hu¬
man existence—a contingency that may at any moment hurl
us all unsuspecting into non-being. Death does not arrive
punctually by appointment. The idea of Nothingness or
Nothing had up to this time played no role at all in Western
philosophy. At the very beginning of Greek philosophy,
Parmenides had warned against following the path of non-
being, for non-being, he said, cannot even be thought. Dur-

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

117

ing the ages of Scholastic philosophy the Nothing, nihil,
had been a purely conceptual entity, an empty abstraction
that lay at the farthest reaches of thought. But for Pascal
it was no longer an abstraction but an experience. At a cer¬
tain moment of his existence, Nothingness had suddenly
and drastically revealed itself to him. Thereafter, Pascal
searched everywhere for evidences of the contingent in hu¬
man existence—in the length of Cleopatra’s nose, which al¬
tered the destinies of Mark Antony and the Roman Empire,
in the grain of sand in Cromwell’s kidney that put an end
to his military dictatorship. And long before Heidegger and
Sartre introduced their jawbreaking names for all the cate¬
gories that define human contingency, Pascal had seen that
to be bom is itself for the individual the prime contingency,
since it means to be bom at this time, this place, of these
parents and this country—all of these brutally given facts
on which his life has to seek to found itself.

Nothingness, for Pascal, opens as it were both downward
and upward. He lived in the age of the microscope and the
telescope, when the tight, tidy, finite cosmos of Aristotle and
the medieval thinkers was being expanded in both direc¬
tions, toward the infinitesimally minute and the infinitely
great. We go downward, cleaving matter and space, and
finding the unbelievable and minute organizations of life at
lower and lower levels; and always there are things beyond
these that exceed our comprehension because of their mi¬
nuteness. Or we go outward into space and find the universe
dwarfing us by its vastness. Man thus occupies a middle
position in the universe, as Pascal saw, between the infini¬
tesimal and the infinite: he is an All in relation to Nothing¬
ness, a Nothingness in relation to the All. This middle posi¬
tion of man is the final and dominant fact of the human
condition with which Pascal leaves us, and it suggests per¬
fectly what we can expect of the range and powers of man’s
reason. It is also a perfect image of the finitude of human
existence, invaded as it were on both sides by the Nothing.
Man is his finitude. And if we add a consideration of the
infinite duration of time to this predominately spatial and

Il8 IRRATIONAL MAN

material image, we get Pascal’s ultimate judgment on the
nature of human existence:

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed
up in the eternity before and after, the little space which
I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity
of space of which I am ignorant, and which knows me
not, I am frightened, and am astonished being here rather
than there, why now rather than then.

Reading this, we are no longer in the world of a TertuUian
or a St. Augustine, in the violent fervor of an expanding
and conquering Christianity; nor in the Romanesque world
of a Peter Damiani or St. Bernard when the most naive
and beautiful works of Christian art were being created;
nor in the world in which Duns Scotus debated the posi¬
tions taken by St. Thomas and in which Christian faith was
so strong that it could make a miraculous marriage with
the philosophy of Aristotle. No; it is our world, the modem
world, that Pascal depicts, and reading him we enter that
world as our home just because we are as homeless there
as he was.

Pascal died in 1662. There followed a century of such
blinding light, the century of the Enlightenment, that his
example seemed not to be needed and so was forgotten.
The light of the Enlightenment became thus its own dark¬
ness. The accomplishments of this extraordinary era cannot
be undervalued. In that century the conquests in mathe¬
matics and physics were extended; the universe of Newton
became a consolidated conquest and, due to the marvelous
fertility and ingenuity of mathematical analysis, seemed to
afford answers to all the problems of nature. The great vic¬
tories won by reason in mathematics and physics suggested
inevitably its extension into all other fields of human expe¬
rience in order to dispel the shadows of ancient superstition:
into law, custom, government, and history. The idea of
Progress was announced not only as fact, but as a law of
history. The perfectibility of human nature was to be real¬
ized through the universal application of reason. The phi-

CHRISTIAN SOURCES

119

losopher Condillac outlined a scheme of universal history,
whose guiding thread was the progress of man from dark¬
ness to light—a progress that had gone steadily forward in
the past and would continue so indefinitely. Philosophers
became critics, attacking the medieval barbarisms of the so¬
ciety around them. The century found its symbol and sum¬
mation in that curious episode at the height of the French
Revolution when the goddess of Reason, in the person of a
well-known actress, was enthroned in the Cathedral of
Notre Dame. Our Lady of Reason in the temple of the
Queen of Heaven—an ironical switch that might have sug¬
gested to anyone faintly familiar with the personality and
history of goddesses that extremely stormy weather lay
ahead, and not only for France but for European civiliza¬
tion as a whole.

But there were also some unhappy souls in the universe
of Newton and of the goddess of Reason, and to these we
must now lend an ear. The first voices to be heard are,
as we might expect, those of the poets. Poets are witnesses
to Being before the philosophers are able to bring it into
thought. And what these particular poets were struggling
to reveal, in this case, were the very conditions of Being
that are ours historically today. They were sounding, in
poetic terms, the premonitory chords of our own era.

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

Chapter Six

Anyone who has read Swift’s Gullivers Travels probably
will not have forgotten the episode of the voyage to
Laputa, which is among the most bizarre of that great and
fantastic book. Laputa is an island that floats in the air.
It is driven by the power of an immense magnet and navi¬
gated by means of magnetic lines of force, which to our
latter-day minds suggests something like a radar apparatus.
Swift’s technology was not so advanced that he could im¬
agine machinery that would enable the inhabitants of the
Zeppelinlike island to cut themselves off altogether from the
earth: the lines of force used to navigate by are still those
of the earth, and so to that degree the Laputans are earth-
bound. Nevertheless, they are the nearest things to crea¬
tures of the air that Gulliver encounters anywhere on his
long and varied journey, and their character belongs as
much as possible to the aerial element.

What this aery quality in their nature consists of, we are
not long in finding out. When the shipwrecked Gulliver is
rescued and brought up to this island, he finds the inhabit¬
ants the oddest-looking creatures he has ever seen. Their
eyes do not focus on the person or object before them; in¬
stead one eye is turned upward as if in perpetual contem¬
plation of the stars, and the other turned inward in empty
and vacuous introversion. Their garments are decorated
with emblems of the sun, moon, stars, and of various
musical instruments. Mathematics and mathematical as¬
tronomy are the subjects to which we would expect these

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

121

aery creatures to devote themselves, since those are the
most abstract studies, the most detached from ordinary ter¬
restrial claims. But why music, the most directly emotional
of the arts? Emotion, of course, is not the aspect of music
that Swift had in mind; he meant the Laputans’ music to
have the significance it had in the Pythagorean or Platonic
tradition, when it was thought of as a purely mathematical
study, a branch of applied arithmetic. Laputa might thus
be called the kingdom of the pure Platonists, and Swift’s
imagination gave this people a local habitation to match
the spirit of its Platonism: an island that floats in the blue.
That vigorous coarseness of Swift’s temperament, which ex¬
pressed itself even in the name he chose for this place, la
puta, suggests and may even have been inspired by Lu¬
ther’s equally vigorous and coarse exclamation, “The whore
reason!”

Because they control the air over the land below, the La¬
putans hold subject the ordinary earthly people in their
vicinity. The subjects, however, seem to be a good deal
happier than their rulers. The Laputans in fact, despite
their power, are a dreary and sad lot. These cerebral people
are incapable of the ordinary human interchange involved
in conversation. When they go into society they have to be
accompanied by a servant boy carrying a stick at the end
of which is a bladder filled with pebbles or dried peas;
these rattle as the boy strikes the mouth or the ears of his
master, as the case may be, to signal him when he is to talk
and when to listen while conversing with another Laputan.
The absent-minded intellectual might otherwise drift off
into speculation and forget altogether about the person in
front of him. At dinner in Laputa, Gulliver finds the food
is served cut in all manner of geometrical shapes. When a
tailor comes to fit Gulliver with a suit of clothes, he takes
the measurements by means of sextant, quadrant, and
other scientific gadgets; then brings back a very ill-fitting
garment. Geometry evidently does not provide a very ac¬
curate means of measuring the organic human form; an or¬
dinary tape measure, made flexible in order to follow the
contours of the body, would do better. On a visit to their

122

IRRATIONAL MAN

academy of sciences Gulliver finds the Laputans engaged
in all manner of fantastic and harebrained schemes of re¬
search. Actually, these researches might not seem so fan¬
tastic to us today; they do have analogies in contemporary
scientific invention. Clearly, we are further advanced in the
ways of Laputa than Swift’s imagination led him to be.

We need not go into all the details by which Swift visited
his scorn upon these abstract minds. In fact, nothing
very much happens during Gulliver’s sojourn among the
Laputans that is not overshadowed in one’s memory simply
by the weird image of the people themselves. However, one
tiny incident serves to set the whole episode in its proper
human perspective. The Laputan wives are not very happy
with their Platonist husbands; and shortly before Gulliver’s
arrival in the kingdom there had been a great scandal at
court because the wife of the prime minister had run away,
despite all efforts to restrain her, to the mainland below to
take up with an old footman who got drunk regularly and
beat her. Women as creatures of nature will prefer passion
to pure reason, even if the passion is accompanied by
drunkenness and blows. A beating is at least a recognition
of one’s own individual existence.

In this part of Gulliver’s Travels Swift does not seem in
the least to be trying to play the prophet. His temperament
was too downright, positive, and passionately concrete to
bother very much about assuming the mantle of prophecy.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—and he had
enough to do to put up with the imbecility of English poli¬
tics and to bear with the tedium of life in Ireland, where
he had been sent, as he himself puts it, to die like a rat in
a hole. Nevertheless, this episode from Gulliver (a book
that appeared in 1726) can be taken as a forecast of the
cultural history of western Europe, or at least of one sizable
slice of that history, over the next hundred and fifty years.
The prophet’s power is in proportion to his character, and
the testimony of Swift gains all the more force in coming
from the kind of man he was. Were there any of the high
and exotic color of romanticism about Swift, we might set
down his prophetic diatribe as the eccentric product of a

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

123

romantic temperament unlucky enough to be bom before
its time. But Swift is a great writer of prose because he
wrote prose and not something else: his is perhaps the best
example in English literature of simple, straightforward,
even plain prose; and the temperament of the man matched
the temper of his writing. Nowhere did he espouse any ir¬
rational attitude toward life; he repeatedly extolled the
virtues of reason, but it was always down-to-earth and
practical reason that he had in mind. He had little taste—
and little capacity, for that matter—for the more abstract
exercises of reason: the Laputa episode of Gullivers Travels
might almost be taken as Swift’s final vengeance upon the
examiners at Trinity College who failed him because he did
not do well enough in logic. Coming from such a prosy and
non-romantic temperament, the image of Laputa is proba¬
bly the most powerfully prophetic we could find. The men
and movements of which it does stand as a prediction will
find themselves at times in the desperate quandary of the
prime minister’s wife, ready to throw themselves into the
arms of a drunken footman if that is the only way out of
the sterile kingdom of reason. In the search for the Diony¬
sian, after all, one cannot always be expected to be bound
by good taste.

Who, then, are these men and movements that Swift
predicts?

1. THE ROMANTICS

The whole movement of Romanticism, which not long
after the appearance of Swift’s work thrust up its first shoots
in England, is at bottom an attempt to escape from Laputa.
However we choose to characterize Romanticism—as a pro¬
test of the individual against the universal laws of classi¬
cism, or as the protest of feeling against reason, or again
as the protest on behalf of nature against the encroach¬
ments of an industrial society—what is clear is that it is,
in every case, a drive toward that fullness and naturalness
of Being that the modem world threatens to let sink into
oblivion. The Romantic movement was not confined to one

124

IRRATIONAL MAN

country, but passed like a great spasm of energy and en¬
thusiasm over the whole of Europe—England, France, Ger¬
many, Italy—finding somewhat different national expres¬
sions in each country but always preserving the same inner
characteristics. Among its English representatives, the fig¬
ures of three poets—Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge—de¬
serve our passing attention.

Blake is recognized easily enough as the poet against the
industrial revolution. The imagery of wheels, forges, fur¬
naces, smoke, and Satanic mills is strewn throughout his
poems. But he was a poet of considerably more intellectual
substance than an early, rather patronizing essay by T. S.
Eliot has led most of our current literati to think. Blake was
not merely a critic of industrial society as such, but of
that particular attitude of mind from which industrialism
springs:

The atoms of Democritus

And Newton’s particles of light

Are sands upon the Red sea shore

Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

Mills and furnaces are evil, to Blake, because they are the
external manifestations of the abstract and mechanical
mind which means the death of man. Robert Graves has
argued that in his prophetic books Blake was seeking to
resurrect an ancient bardic tradition dating back to the
days of pre-Christian Britain. This may very well be the
case, but I think we should not neglect to observe that
Blake calls these books “prophetic,” that prophecy has to
do with the future, and that Blake, as a genuine seer, was
concerned with the vision of what man might become. One
of these works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is of
particular significance here because in a good many ways
it anticipates Nietzsche, as it also anticipates a good deal
of the psychologist Jung in our century. “Drive your plow
over the bones of the dead” is not the aphorism of a man
who is seeking merely to hearken back to the “green &
pleasant land” of ancient Britain. If man marries his hell
to his heaven, his evil to his good, Blake holds, he will be¬
come a creature such as the earth has not yet seen. Nietz-

THE FLIGHT FROM LAFUTA 125

sche put the same insight paradoxically: “Mankind must
become better and more evil.”

This point is worth emphasizing here at the outset, in
connection with Blake, because Romanticism did in many
of its manifestations take on the trappings of a revival of
or a return to the past, to the Gothic ages or Homeric
Greece, or to any past age of enchantment that seemed to
stand outside the tawdriness of the present; in some quar¬
ters the movement has almost come to be defined in those
terms. But basically, although they were sometimes uncon¬
scious of it, the Romantics were moved by a vision of the
future, of human possibilities, rather than of the past; of
what man might become rather than of what he actually
was or had been. Hence the vitality among them of the
tradition which takes the poet to be a genuine seer.

Wordsworth is so respectable a figure—we can see him
almost as a gaitered and benign English clergyman—that
he helps us to avoid the error of locating the inner meaning
of Romanticism in a search for exoticism, a gaudy parade
of colored lights and high romance. With the exception of
the German poet Holderlin, Wordsworth was probably the
most philosophic poet of Romanticism; and it is to be re¬
gretted that no English philosopher has made the kind of
commentary on his poems that Heidegger has made on
those of Holderlin. Whitehead, who owes much of his own
philosophy to Wordsworth’s feeling for nature, has thrown
out a few brilliant asides on his work, and that is all we
have. Wordsworth was not a philosophical poet because he
knew something about Platonism and a little about German
Transcendentalism that he had picked up from Coleridge,
and expressed these bits of philosophy gnomically in some
of his best-known poems. Nor is he at his final philosophical
depth when he criticizes, and quite acutely, the intellect
as something that severs us from the immediate feeling for
nature:

Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:

We murder to dissect.

Wordsworth is not at his most philosophic when he is being

126 IRRATIONAL MAN

pithy or gnomic, or otherwise drawing an explicit moral.
A deeper philosophy resides in some of his poems in which
he was able, almost miraculously, to locate man in nature,
to reveal his being as a being-in. Thus one of the great
poems, “Resolution and Independence,” begins with the
magnificent lines:

There was a roaring in the winds all night.

The rain came heavily and fell in floods.

The poet wanders over the moors, encounters an old man
who is gathering leeches at a pond, hears his story, and
then concludes, moved by the old man’s example, with
some stoical comments on the necessity of facing life with
courage. But what sticks in the mind is the marvelous way
in which the leech gatherer is located in nature, along with
stone and tree and moor. Whitehead called this quality the
togethemess-of-things, and he claimed to have come by this
philosophical insight through studying the poets of nature
like Wordsworth. But Whitehead’s expression is not yet
adequate: it is not that man is a thing essentially together
with other things in the natural landscape: rather, before
he is a thing, he is-in; his being is a being-in before it is
the being of a thing.

Wordsworth himself never expressed this meaning con¬
ceptually; perhaps he had not arrived at the point of grasp¬
ing it conceptually, perhaps this meaning of Being cannot
very well be grasped conceptually. But it is there, revealed
in his poetry; and it is indeed what gives positive meaning
to all those other poems in which he is simply moralizing,
protesting that urban man—by which he means modem
man—by cutting himself off from nature has cut himself off
from the roots of his own Being.

Though he was immensely more learned philosophically
than Wordsworth, nevertheless in this particular respect
Coleridge’s work is of less philosophic significance. In his
most successful and famous poems—such as The Ancient
Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel—he exhibits chiefly the
“romance” aspect of Romanticism, the freedom of the im¬
agination to find its materials outside the stringent catego-

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

127

ries of neoclassicism. But in one poem, and a very great
one, Defection: An Ode , Coleridge produced something so
modem that we can call it existential even though it was
written before the Existentialists. The ode is a lament on his
failing powers as a poet, powers that have dried up because
Coleridge is no longer able to find joy in nature. These pow¬
ers are identical with the power to be in communion with
nature. What makes Coleridge’s statement of the matter so
impressive is that he himself participates in the feeling;
Wordsworth’s protests against the severance of man from
nature were laments for his fellow men who were being
thus cut off, not for himself—his own powers of communion
with nature seemed to have survived intact. But Coleridge,
who was himself one of the wretched—cut off, forlorn, mis¬
erable, derelict—was the first to explore this thoroughly
modem mood from the inside. What happens to man when
he is thus severed from nature? Here Coleridge encounters,
in thoroughly existential fashion, anxiety itself. He cannot
pin down this anxiety, cannot attach it to any definite ob¬
ject, event, or person; it is the revelation of void or non-
being.

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

Which finds no natural outlet, no relief.

In word, or sigh, or tear—

All the German idealism with which poor Coleridge’s head
was crammed had nothing to say to him about this experi¬
ence; it did not even provide the terms necessary for its
philosophic comprehension. Kierkegaard had not yet intro¬
duced the analysis of dread into philosophy. Coleridge the
poet, however, saw and knew before Coleridge the phi¬
losopher.

Coleridge’s melancholy condition in this respect is pre¬
cisely that of Faust at the beginning of Goethe’s drama.
Both are in or near the condition of breakdown, trapped
in a paralysis of feeling in which everything has turned to
dust and ashes, including the meddling intellect that has

128

IRRATIONAL MAN

tyrannized over both. Coleridge has lost life to German
metaphysics:

by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man;

Faust to a reckless attempt to master all of human learning,
which Goethe dismisses in the final statement of intellectual
disenchantment: “Gray is all theory, green is life’s glowing
tree." Coleridge’s poem is so intensely personal that we can¬
not take this parallel with Goethe to be a case of literary
imitation: it was due rather to a kind of experience that
had become momentous for the men of that period, as it
still is today. Midway in his life—and it was a long life—
Goethe insisted on detaching himself from the movement
of Romanticism. So far as that gesture applied to the senti¬
mentality of an early work like Werther it was certainly
valid; but the theme of Faust had laid hold of Goethe in
his very earliest days, when he was at his most romantic,
and it was a theme that continued to occupy him through¬
out his life. Since his greatest work deals with the central
problem of Romanticism, it cannot be left out of any ac¬
count of the movement, and indeed Goethe’s final handling
of the problem, in the poem, was the culmination of all
his youthful experience of Romanticism.

We have particularly to call attention to Faust, in this
connection, because it deals with the very problem with
which Nietzsche was later to wrestle, both in his own life
and in his philosophy: How is man to be bom out of con¬
temporary despair into a more complete and vigorous being
than history has yet known? Goethe never uses Nietzsche’s
word Superman, but there can be no doubt that what we
encounter in the Second Part of Faust (completed just be¬
fore the poet’s death) is Goethe’s own conception of a
superior mortal, in fact a Superman, for in his old age Faust
has almost transcended his humanity. At the beginning of
the play, with the well of life gone dry inside him, Faust
decides to commit suicide and is just raising the poison gob¬
let to his bps when he is stopped by hearing from the street
an Easter hymn to Christ’s resurrection. At the moment of

THE FLIGHT FROM LAFUTA

129

crisis it is the remembrance of Christianity that intervenes:
Faust-Goethe is still tied to the collective being of mankind
for whom the symbol of resurrection is inevitably Christ.
Since he is not to commit suicide, how then is Faust to be
reborn? Mephistopheles appears; Faust makes his pact
with the Devil and from a withered old scholar is trans¬
formed into a radiant and handsome youth. It is the same
solution to the problem of human energy that Blake
preached: the marriage of hell and heaven, the pact with
one’s own devil; or, in Nietzsche’s terms, the marriage of
one’s good and evil in order to arrive at the point that is
beyond good and evil because it is the source of them both
—the Self in its craving to live and grow.

The original Faust was an old medieval scholar who
turned to magic and the black arts; and in Marlowe’s ver¬
sion, Doctor Faustus, Faust is the demoniacal magician who
seeks power over popes and emperors. Goethe internalized
Faust’s quest, indeed turned him into a man of his own
time, yet the original overtones of magic and alchemy still
surround this character. Goethe himself had read a good
deal of alchemy at one time, and part of the original fascina¬
tion of the historical Faust, for him, was the dark halo of
magic around him, the sign of a craving to transcend or¬
dinary humanity. Now, magic and alchemy are perfectly
appropriate symbols for our aspirations toward freedom.
The problem of free will does not present itself to us in
life in the cool and sterilized abstractions of the philoso¬
phers. To free oneself, to break the chains of a situation,
whether inner or outer, that imprisons one is to experience
something like the magical power that commands things to
do its bidding, The figure of the magician is, as it were, the
primitive image of human freedom. Scholars tell us that the
ideograms in some of the older Chinese writings that are
usually translated “men of virtue” might be more accurately
rendered as “men of magic”; and indeed the sage, the
virtuous man, he who could command himself and there¬
fore others, must have struck earlier mankind as something
of a magician. In any case, magic and alchemy recur
throughout the whole course of the Romantic movement,

130 ERRATIONAL MAN

always as the deep archetypal symbols of aspiration toward
a higher and fuller level of Being. Even Goethe in his old
age, by then the cool and classic Olympian, introduces into
the Second Part of Faust an alchemical scene in which
a little man, homunculus—Is he perhaps future man?—is
brewed in a retort.

It is in later French Romanticism, as it passes over into
Symbolism, that this spiritual craving of poets for magic and
alchemy becomes more noticeable. Baudelaire was the most
remarkable figure in this phase of the movement, the initia¬
tor or precursor of almost everything that we know as “mod¬
ern poetry.” He was the first poet of the city, as others be¬
fore him had been poets of the countryside. As such, he
sounds a new and more extreme note of human alienation.
Where Wordsworth had been a rural man, observing and
condemning the city but always writing about it from out¬
side, Baudelaire is inside the city, the swarming anthill of
alien and faceless men, in whose streets he is utterly a
stranger. Romantic melancholy, as we have seen in the case
of Coleridge, is nothing less than man’s discovery of his
own estrangement from Being; in Baudelaire this becomes
Spleen, and takes on the dimensions of revolt. It is not only
a social revolt against the materialism of bourgeois society,
but a metaphysical revolt against the kind of world created
by the positivism and scientism of the present age. The poet
does not find reality in such a world, he must search for it
in some other hidden sphere of Being. Hence, Baudelaire’s
doctrine of “correspondences,” according to which the poet
must seek out the arcane and obscure images in nature,
somewhat like one of the ancient astrologers or diviners.
Poetry is no longer an art merely of making verses, but a
magical means of arriving at some truer and more real
sphere of Being. Poetry becomes a substitute for a religion.

For this last attitude, of course, Baudelaire and his fol¬
lowers have been very much taken to task by some French
Catholic critics. Such critics are certainly right in their judg¬
ment that poetry would not have developed these extraor¬
dinary aspirations if man had remained within his historic
container, Christian faith. But it will not do to lecture these

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA 131

poets smugly, as if they were delinquent children who have
run away from home. The fact is that there was no home
for them to stay in. They themselves did not create the
human condition into which they were thrown by the nine¬
teenth century; they merely experienced it as their fatality,
while others, less sensitive, were not aware of what had hap¬
pened in the world. We are not dealing here with a mere
aesthetic perversion, but with a genuine human revolt—a
point that becomes indisputable in the case of the poet
Rimbaud, whose revolt was in fact so genuine that the poet
literally paid for it with his life. It is a mistake to consider
the Romantic poets as excessive and self-indulgent aes¬
thetes; for them the value of the aesthetic attitude was al¬
ways metaphysical and concerned with the total human
condition.

It seems a very long step from the serenity of Words¬
worth to the violence of Rimbaud, who heralded “the era
of assassins.” Yet the filiation is direct; only a few conditions
had to change or grow more acute to produce, instead of
the earlier, the later Romantic. The rest of mankind might
be cut off from contact with nature, but Wordsworth, as
we have seen, remained secure in the belief that he at least
possessed the mana and was in touch. He did indeed have
that mana, and though the possession of it may have been
fleeting, Wordsworth’s self-conceit was such that he never
perceived himself at any time as being without it. Hence
he never shared the despair of his fellow Romantics. But
the poet has only to lose the mana, or the security of his
belief in himself as never being without it, and he finds
himself sharing the forlorn and derelict fate of the rest of
mankind. His despair has only to become desperation, and
to ally itself with a violent will to power, a will to reconquer
by the most extreme measures if necessary, the lost province
of Being from which modem man has been extruded—and
we have Rimbaud. Rimbaud remained true to his vision: he
ended by giving up poetry and leaving Europe—a civiliza¬
tion he thought doomed—to go off and run guns in Abys¬
sinia. The demands he had made of poetry, as a revelation
of an unknown truth, were too severe; in the end he spoke

132

IRRATIONAL MAN

of it with disgust as “one of my follies.” In any case, it
became irrelevant to his final project, the forging of the
Self. For the man who seeks to transcend humanity, poetry
is not enough: it will only lead back to the squabbles of
sectarian literati or the exegeses of dry-as-dust professors,
and the poet will be caught up again in the web of a banal
and mechanical civilization. Rimbaud burst like a rocket in
the sky of French poetry, and then by the very force of his
trajectory was carried beyond it. But in the course of this
brilliant flight he brought all the hidden problems of Ro¬
manticism to the fore.

For one thing, Rimbaud’s unconditional break with
Western civilization—the civilization of the white man—was
the sign of a break within this civilization. Rimbaud was
thus among the first of the creative artists to announce
primitivism as one of the goals of his art and of his life.
From Gauguin to D. H. Lawrence primitivism has been
such a varied and rich source in modem art that academi¬
cians or rationalists would be ill advised to dismiss it out of
hand as a mere symptom of “decadence.” One might ask,
in any case, whether it is not the civilization itself that has
become decadent rather than those creative individuals
within it who struggle to rediscover the wellsprings of hu¬
man vitality. With Rimbaud primitivism was far from being
a sentimental decor for the spirit, an illicit longing after the
South Seas and maidens in sarongs; rather it was a pas¬
sionate and genuine struggle to get back to the primitive—
which is to say, primary—sources of Being and vision. We
need not approve of the particular means Rimbaud used
for this in order to acknowledge the validity and necessity
of his task. Rimbaud surrendered himself in the end to the
demon of the will to action, thus proving himself a true
child of Western civilization. He does not seem to have
found any other course possible. While following it, how¬
ever, he revealed the tremendous potential of energy and
action that Romanticism harbored explosively within itself.
Romantic melancholy was no mere matter of languor or the
vapors; nor was it an outbreak of personal neurosis, im¬
potence, or sickness among a few individuals; rather it was

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

133

a revelation to modem man of the human condition into
which he had fallen, a condition that is nothing less than
the estrangement from Being itself. Once having lost con¬
tact with the natural world, however, man catches a dizzy
and intoxicating glimpse of human possibilities, of what
man might become, in comparison with which the old
myths of the magician and the sorcerer seem pallid indeed.
Rimbaud was the poet of these possibilities as Nietzsche
was to be their thinker.

2. THE RUSSIANS: DOSTOEVSKI
AND TOLSTOY

From Paris to Moscow or St. Petersburg is a long jour¬
ney; and it looks like even a longer step from later French
Romanticism and Symbolism to the realistic fiction of the
great Russian writers. It is indeed a complete change of
literary climate. What one prizes above all in the Russian
writers is their direct grasp of life, their radical scorn
of the artifices and artificialities of literary form and sym¬
bol, which became so consuming a preoccupation among
French poets. In his What is ArtP Tolstoy has some pages
passionately denouncing Baudelaire and his followers as
decadent and artificial writers. Yet for all this difference in
their attitude toward the nature of literature itself, we shall
find in the Russian writers the same insights about modem
man. So far as Existentialism is concerned, we are here on
even richer soil.

Conditions in nineteenth-century Russia thrust the writer
into a position where he was forced to confront the ultimate
problems of human life. Hence, no matter how realistic may
be its literary tone, Russian fiction is thoroughly metaphysi¬
cal and philosophical at bottom. The contrast between East
and West was as sharp then as now, though it yielded much
richer fruits for nineteenth-century writers. Russia was ab¬
sorbing Western culture at breakneck speed, and the strain
of this absorption produced throughout her whole society a
situation of extraordinary tension and ambivalence. The
very backwardness of the country, which gave rise to a

134

IRRATIONAL MAN

smoldering but profound sense of inferiority in cultured
Russians, could at the same time be the cause of an over¬
weening feeling of superiority toward western Europe and
all its refinements. The West stood for the Enlightenment,
true, but Russia—with her vast spaces, mud, illiterate peas¬
antry, and archaic Church—at least was in contact still with
old Mother Earth; and the Russian Slavophile, convinced
of his nation’s messianic destiny, could spurn, as he does
today, the decadence of the West. The word “intelligentsia”
is of Russian origin; its coinage bears witness to the fact
that intellectuals, whatever their original social or economic
class, felt themselves a distinct cultural group in Russia be¬
cause by their very nature they were alienated from the
rest of the society. Outside of the small glow of fight cast
by the cultured circles in Moscow and Petersburg, Russia
was an immense wasteland populated by primitive peas¬
antry and ineSectual gentry. The intelligentsia were so con¬
scious of themselves as a class because the head, in their
country, was so far removed from the body social. The ad¬
vent of Communism in 1917 belongs in the general scheme
of Russian development, which began in the eighteenth
century with the violent imposition of Western ways by
Peter the Great. Social and political reforms exerted from
above, the forcing of new ways down upon the old, cannot
fail to produce acute dislocation and tension. The Russian
writers of the nineteenth century had an opportunity (as
they no longer have) to convert this human upheaval, if
not into a form of social critique, at least into a spiritual
revelation.

Because they were placed outside of Western culture-
driven on the one hand to devour it greedily, as the indis¬
pensable tool of their own literary profession, on the other
hand impelled to stand apart from it in order to assert their
own identity—the Russian writers were in a unique and
privileged position, from which they could see this culture
in a way that Western eyes could not. The sharp contradic¬
tion between their own existence as intellectuals and that
of the rest of the vast, shapeless, backward social body of
Russia enabled them to see this as a contradiction central to

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

13S

the whole culture of the Enlightenment. Intellectuals as a
class suffer to the degree that they are cut off from the
rest of mankind. But intellectuals are the embodiment of
reason, and reason itself if cut off from the concrete life of
ordinary mankind is bound to decay. When the head is too
far away from the body, the head withers—or goes crazy.
The whole of the European Enlightenment, in the eyes of
these writers, faced this threat. It would be a mistake to
consider this feeling of Tolstoy and Dostoevski as a mere
manifestation of Russian nationalism, or as the Russian
sense of inferiority converting itself into one of superiority;
rather, the Russian condition placed these men in a position
to see a threat that was really there.

A society that is going through a process of dislocation
and upheaval, or of revolution, is bound to cause suffering
to individuals, but this suffering itself can bring one closer
to one’s own existence. Habit and routine are great veils
over our existence. As long as they are securely in place,
we need not consider what life means; its meaning seems
sufficiently incarnate in the triumph of the daily habit.
When the social fabric is rent, however, man is suddenly
thrust outside, away from the habits and norms he once
accepted automatically. There, on the outside, his question¬
ing begins. Thrust out into the cold air of the Western En¬
lightenment, with its ideals of reason, progress, and lib¬
eralism, the Russian found his old religion a burning
question. God, freedom, and immortality became topics not
for the professional philosopher but for Everyman. We are
told how Russian youths used to sit up all night arguing
these matters. Such naivete and passion were on their way
out in the West, where the same arguments had taken place
a century earlier. Precisely because Russia was a backward
country in this respect—because it had no developed tradi¬
tion of professional or professorial philosophy—there was no
insulating screen between the questions and the personal
passion such questions ought to arouse. The absence of a
philosophical tradition, however, does not mean necessarily
the absence of a philosophical revelation: the Russians did
not have philosophers, but they did have Dostoevski and

136

mRATIONAL MAN

Tolstoy; and the substitute was perhaps not a total loss.
When in the next century a professional philosopher, Hei¬
degger, began to re-examine the meaning of death, he took
as his starting point a story by Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan
Ilyich; and entire volumes have been written on the sub¬
ject of Dostoevski’s existential insights by thinkers like
Berdyaev and Shestov.

The first novel Dostoevski wrote after his return from im¬
prisonment in Siberia was Memoirs from the House of the
Dead. Since the book came after the decisive events of his
life—his near execution by a firing squad and his penal
servitude in Siberia—it can be taken as the beginning of the
real Dostoevski. The narrative that comprises the second
part of the book, which is the novel proper, is fairly negligi¬
ble; but the first part, the description of prison life in
Siberia, is of crucial importance in understanding Dostoev¬
ski’s deepest insights into human nature. An experience like
his in this Siberian prison lay outside the whole humanistic
tradition of European culture and could only be expected
to yield knowledge of man that that tradition had not yet
come upon. No classicist or rationalist, armed with the
Aristotelian definition of man as the rational animal, could
have been exposed to such a welter of humanity and still
have retained his ancient convictions. What Dostoevski
saw in the criminals he lived with is what he came finally
to see at the center of man’s nature: contradiction, ambiva¬
lence, irrationality. There was a childishness and innocence
about these criminals, along with a brutality and cruelty,
altogether not unlike the murderous innocence of a child.
The men he knew could not be categorized as a criminal
type and thus isolated from the rest of the species, man;
these criminals were not “types,” but thoroughly individual
beings: violent, energetic, intensely living shoots from the
parent stalk. In them Dostoevski was face to face with the
demoniacal in human nature: perhaps man is not the ra¬
tional but the demoniacal animal. A rationalist who loses
sight of the demoniacal cannot understand human beings;
he cannot even read our current tabloids.

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

137

In The House of the Dead the philosophic theme re¬
mains unstated; it is implicit simply in the human material
with which the novelist is dealing. In Crime and Punish¬
ment, however, Dostoevski embarked upon the kind of the¬
matic novel that is so distinctly his. The hero, Raskolnikov,
is the alienated intellectual—alienated at once from the col¬
lective body of mankind and from his own being. Hungry
and solitary, he spins out of the bowels of his own reason a
Nietzschean theory (before Nietzsche) of the Superman
who through his own superior daring and strength rises
above all ordinary moral codes. Then to put his theory to
the test he kills an old pawnbroker. But the criminal is un¬
equal to his crime: Raskolnikov’s theory has not reckoned
with his own self, and the guilt over his crime brings on
a breakdown. Precisely the feelings that had been repressed
in this intellectual—the ordinary human horror at the tak¬
ing of life—erupt and take their revenge. What drove
Raskolnikov to the crime had nothing to do with the jus¬
tifications he fabricated to himself: He reasoned, “I am
poor, this old pawnbroker is a louse; by killing and robbing
her, I can relieve my mother of the awful strain of paying
for my studies”; but in fact, as he admits finally to the girl
Sonia, he killed in order to prove to himself that he was
not a louse like the ordinary rim of mankind. The will to
power—the demoniacal will to power—was thus discovered
by Dostoevski before Nietzsche made it his theme. But, un¬
like Nietzsche, Dostoevski did not lose sight of the thor¬
oughly dialectical, or ambivalent, nature of this drive: The
will to power is weakness as well as strength, and the more
it is cut off and isolated from the rest of the human per¬
sonality, the more desperate, in its weakness, it can become.
Thus Raskolnikov kills out of insecurity and weakness, not
out of an excess of strength: he kills because he is des¬
perately afraid that he is nobody. And indeed he is, for his
mind has so lost touch with the rest of him that he is not,
properly speaking, a self.

These destructive and even criminal possibilities of rea¬
son were the philosophic themes on which Dostoevski
played his most persistent variations. In The Brothers

138

IRRATIONAL MAN

Karamazov the appealing Ivan Karamazov is led, through a
stubborn pride of intellect, into a revolt against God; his
final breakdown, due to a medically vague “brain fever,”
is dramatically appropriate—nemesis striking down its vic¬
tim through the offending organ. In The Possessed a group
of political intellectuals are shown as being possessed by
devils, ready to scheme, lie, even kill for the abstract ideals
of Progress, reason, socialism. The political events of the last
two decades have made The Possessed seem far less fan¬
tastic than some of our own intellectuals thought it during
the Marxist period of the thirties. Nevertheless, some lib¬
eral minds still feel Dostoevski goes too far; that despite
his amazing accuracy as a prophet of the political course of
Russia as it was to be acted out some fifty or sixty years
later, too much of his message is tied to an archaic and
messianic Christianity.

To be sure, Dostoevski as a thinker is not always a safe
guide: the thought in his case too evidently partakes of the
being of the thinker, and therefore often has a frenzied and
hysterical quality. But Dostoevski as a psychologist—or
rather, as the artist who reveals a certain psychological
stratum in man—sets before us data on the human condi¬
tion that it would be folly for us to ignore. “He might have
been a liberator of mankind,” Freud remarked of him,
dryly, “instead he chose to be its jailer.” The implication is
that Dostoevski would be more acceptable to a certain type
of modem mind had he been a Freudian; but in that case
he would also have been much less of a psychologist. The
work of Dostoevski in which his attack upon the Enlighten¬
ment seems to carry most conviction for present-day readers
is the novelette Notes from Underground. The impact made
by its dark fulminations against human nature is due, cu¬
riously enough, to the fact that our ears have been some¬
what attuned to such things by modem psychoanalysis;
and to the fact that in this work Dostoevski’s psychological
explorations are less visibly connected with his Christian
faith. We seem to have reached a point where we are will¬
ing to believe the worst about human nature so long as that
worst is not attached to any hope of religious redemption.

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

139

Notes from Underground appeared in 1864. The first
part of this work is one of the most amazing monologues in
all literature: The Underground Man, a petty clerk in the
Russian bureaucracy, voices his spite, indignation, resent¬
ment, and his rebellious longing for freedom. Time and
again in his tirade he refers to “the great crystal palace”
as the symbol of the Enlightenment, with its dream of a
thoroughly rational ordering of human life. This Crystal
Palace had been given material form, as the building that
housed the International Exposition in London in 1851. It
was fitting that this Exposition, in which the bourgeois cen¬
tury congratulated itself on its material progress, should
have been held in England, the country that had led in the
industrial revolution and in the development of liberal and
parliamentary government. Dostoevski’s Underground Man
was the Russian answer to all those pious dreams enshrined
in the Crystal Palace. The Underground Man, who is every-
man or at least one underlying stratum in everyman, rejects
everything for which that Palace and the liberal nineteenth
century stood. In a rational utopia, he cries, man might die
of boredom, or out of the violent need to escape this bore¬
dom start sticking pins in his neighbor—for no reason at all,
just to assert his freedom. If science could comprehend all
phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational so¬
ciety human beings became as predictable as cogs in a ma¬
chine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert
his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine. What
the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect
organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all
too plainly with the novelist’s eye: Namely, that as modem
society becomes more organized and hence more bureauc¬
ratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the
Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface
are monsters of frustration and resentment. Like Nietzsche
after him, Dostoevski was the great explorer of resentment
as a powerful and sometimes unaccountable motive in man.

Dostoevski is too complex and volcanic a figure to be
swallowed at one gulp. There was something of the criminal
in him as well as the saint. The critic Strakhov in his bio-

140 IRRATIONAL MAN

graphical notice may have weighed certain evidence too
heavily against the novelist, but there seems nevertheless to
have been a repulsive and unsavory side to Dostoevski’s
character. Perhaps it was just these human contradictions,
in all their virulence, however, that made Dostoevski so in¬
comparable a witness to the existential truth about man. In
any case, his grasp of nihilism as the basic fact in modem
life was itself never nihilistic. We know this from one pas¬
sage in The Idiot , in which Dostoevski reveals what had
been and was always to be the pivot about which his life
turned. A story is told by Prince Myshkin—the fool of Christ,
another of Dostoevski’s own masks—as coming from another
man, unidentified; but we of course know it to have been
Dostoevski’s own experience. Here is the story in Myshkin’s
words:

This man had once been led out with the others to the
scaffold and a sentence of death was read over him. . . .
Twenty minutes later a reprieve was read to them, and
they were condemned to another punishment instead.
Yet the interval between those two sentences, twenty
minutes or at least a quarter of an hour, he passed in the
fullest conviction that he would die in a few minutes.
. . . The priest went to each in turn with a cross. He
had only five minutes more to live. He told me that those
five minutes seemed to him an infinite time, a vast
wealth. . . . But he said that nothing was so dreadful at
that time as the continual thought, “What if I were not
to diel What if I could go back to life—what eternity!
And it would all be mine! I would turn every minute
into an age; I would lose nothing, I would count every
minute as it passed, I would not waste one!” He said
that this idea turned to such a fury at last that he longed
to be shot quickly.

In this story, which describes Dostoevski’s own reprieve
after he had been condemned to be executed by a firing
squad, is the ultimate affirmation: in the face of death life
has an absolute value. The meaning of death is precisely
its revelation of this value. Such is the existential view of it,

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA 141

elaborated later by Tolstoy in his story The Death of Ivan
Ilyich and by Heidegger in the context of a whole system
of philosophy.

To go from Dostoevski to Tolstoy is a little like emerging
from the lurid air of some subterranean forge into the clear
daylight. It has been said that every man is bom either a
Platonist or an Aristotelian; it might be said with equal jus¬
tice that he is bom either a Tolstoyan or Dostoevskian. If
Dostoevski is the novelist of the abnormal and the morbid,
of the convulsions of the human spirit at its heights and in
its depths, Tolstoy is by contrast the supreme portrayer of
the normal and the organic. Tolstoy himself felt very
keenly this temperamental antipathy to the other man, and
for many years he dismissed Dostoevski as a “morbid medi¬
ocrity.” That view changed, however, and toward the end
of his life The Brothers Karamazov became Tolstoy’s bed¬
side book, the one he read and reread endlessly. This rec¬
onciliation between the two writers is appropriate, for de¬
spite the tremendous differences in the literary and human
atmospheres they create, both bring the same revelation to
the philosophic mind.

As a simple and convenient key to Tolstoy’s existential¬
ism, we may begin with one brief passage from his Anna
Karenina. Karenin, the husband, has suddenly and unex¬
pectedly become jealous of his wife Anna. This jealousy
strikes him as offensive to his wife and to his own moral
breeding, for he has been taught that “one” ought to trust
one’s wife. Karenin is a thoroughly rational type, a dry and
officious intellectual, whose whole life has been constructed
on such rational precepts as to what “one” (the impersonal
and collective one) must be and do. But there, all the same,
is the incalculable and living fact of his jealousy staring him
in the face:

He felt that he was standing face to face with something
illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be
done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face
with life, with the possibility of his wife’s loving some

142

IRRATIONAL MAN

one other than himself, and this seemed to him very ir¬
rational and incomprehensible because it was life itself.
All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked
in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life.
And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had
shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin
to that of a man who, while calmly crossing a bridge
over a precipice, should suddenly discover that the
bridge is broken, and that there is a chasm below. That
chasm was life itself, the bridge that artificial life in
which Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived. For the first time
the question presented itself to him of the possibility of
his wife’s loving some one else, and he was horrified at it.

The great goal for Tolstoy, both as novelist and man, was
just this “standing face to face with life.” Truth itself—the
truth for man—is just this standing face to face with life.
Such truth cannot come from the intellect, for the intellect
may in fact veil it, placing us like Karenin in that imper¬
sonal zone where we know only “the reflection of life”
through concepts, precepts, all the abstract formulae of
social routine; rather, truth is of the whole man. Tolstoy
tells us repeatedly, in his later tracts, that the truth he is
after is not what he knows merely by the intellect but what
he knows with his whole being. More impressively, how¬
ever, he has actually embodied this view of truth in the
structure of his greatest novels.

These novels unfold so simply and naturally that they
do not seem to us to be plotted in the usual sense of literary
contrivance and manipulation, but to be parts of the great
organic process of life itself. Nevertheless, there is always
a Tolstoyan subplot moving parallel to this effortless and
organic sweep of fife: people are bom, love, marry, suffer,
move toward death, but in the midst of this unfolding pano¬
rama there is one character, the emissary of Tolstoy and
the bearer of the spirit, whose story amid all these other
natural involvements is that of the search for truth—for his
own truth and the truth of life itself. Thus we have Levin
in Anna Karenina and Pierre in War and Peace . The things

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

143

that happen to them in the course of the novels—encounters,
love, marriage, suffering—are only so many stages on the
way the spirit takes in search of its truth. In the end Tolstoy
shows them each as finding this truth. And what is it? It
is not, as we have seen, an intellectual truth. Levin and
Pierre are both at odds with the intellectuals of the city,
who far from having found the answer they seek are indeed,
in the artificiality of their life and its estrangement from
nature, more remote from the truth than are the simple
peasantry. (Here Tolstoy, despite his realism, speaks in the
deepest tradition of Romanticism, as a good Wordsworth¬
ian, but with a vigor and boldness beyond anything in
Wordsworth.) The truth Pierre and Levin come to possess
is not intellectual, moreover, because there are no proposi¬
tions—and no system of propositions—they can assert that
would adequately express what it is they have learned out
of all their tribulations. Theirs is not an intellectual, but an
existential truth. It consists in nothing more nor less than
that they now stand more directly “face to face with life
itself.” They are open to what is; and if we were to cast
about for a philosophic expression for this, the nearest we
could come would be Heidegger’s description of truth as
the openness toward Being.

To grasp the Tolstoyan meaning of truth is to grasp the
unity of all his writings—novels, tracts, autobiography—a
unity so strong as to make his work 'virtually unique. Per¬
haps this was so because Tolstoy himself was so much more
than a writer. But anyone who would stand face to face
with life itself must also stand face to face with death, for
death is an inescapable part of life. It is here that Tolstoy’s
passionate quest for truth met the acid test of courage; and
he was equal to it. His preoccupation with death is not
morbid brooding, mere fecklessness, or cowardice, but the
measure of his intense passion for life. It is this that makes
his story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, perhaps the most pow¬
erful description in any literature of what it means to face
death. Ivan Ilyich is a thoroughly ordinary and average
bourgeois—in fact, Everyman; he has acquired success in
the average way, found love and marriage and a family in

144

IRRATIONAL MAN

the average way—as, likewise, the lack of love in the average
way: altogether, a likable and pleasant fellow. He falls from
a ladder, but the accident seems slight and he thinks noth¬
ing of the pain in his side. The pain stays, however, and
grows; he begins to go from doctor to doctor, but no diag¬
nosis seems to serve. Then the horrifying thought dawns
upon him that he may be going to die. The reality of death
lies not in the physical structure, the organs that medical
science examines; it is a reality within Ivan Ilyich’s own
existence:

To Ivan Ilyich only one question was important: was his
case serious or not? But the doctor ignored that inappro¬
priate question. From his point of view it was not under
consideration, the real question was to decide between
a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or appendicitis. It was
not a question of Ivan Ilyich’s life or death, but one be¬
tween a floating kidney and appendicitis.

Nor does death’s reality consist in its being a mere external
social fact, an event that happens to everybody:

The syllogism he had learned from Kiezewetter’s Logic:
“Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mor¬
tal,” always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius,
but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man
in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he
was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite,
quite separate from all others.

The reality of death is precisely that it sunders Ivan Ilyich
from all other human beings, returns him to the absolute
solitude of his own individual self, and destroys the fabric
of society and family in which he had lost himself. But aw¬
ful and inexorable as the presence of death is, it gives to
the dying man the one revelation of truth in his life, even
though the content of this revelation is chiefly the point¬
lessness of the way he has lived.

Tolstoy could not have written this story had not he him¬
self stood face to face at one time with death. Maxim Gorky
knew Tolstoy well for a time, and in his Reminiscences of

THE FLIGHT FROM LAPUTA

145

Tolstoy has given us a remarkable picture of the old man,
indomitably earth-bound, sunning himself like a lizard, and
capable old as he was of such outbursts of sexual profanity
as to make Gorky, himself a pretty robust type, blush in
embarrassment. But this same old man could say to Gorky
one day: “If a man has learned to think , no matter what he
may think about, he is always thinking of his own death.
All philosophers were like that. And what truth can there
be, if there is death?” All philosophers, unfortunately, have
not been like that; and Tolstoy himself would have snorted
with anger and derision at the remark of Spinoza, so typical
in this of the philosophic tradition: “The free man never
thinks of death, but only of life”—as if one could think of
life without thinking of death. In his My Confession, the
story of his own spiritual crisis in middle life and one of the
greatest of existential documents, Tolstoy tells how he him¬
self met the dread presence which finally overwhelms poor
Ivan Ilyich. A happy man; with family, wealth, and fame;
in the full possession of all his physical and mental powers:
nevertheless he suddenly became aware of the possibility
of death, yawning like a chasm beneath his feet. The reve¬
lation was all the more dreadful in view of his boundless
energy and mastery of life; that such a chasm should ap¬
pear at all seemed to him absurd and irrational. He recounts
how he attempted to take stock of himself, to think, to
search through science and philosophy for some answer to
this absurd and grinning presence. But reason holds no an¬
swer to this problem of death: the solution is always the
same, as in an equation in which zero equals zero. The wis¬
dom of the sages—Socrates, Buddha, Ecclesiastes, Schopen¬
hauer—tells us only that in the face of death life is meaning¬
less and an evil; meanwhile, millions of ordinary people
who know nothing of the thought of these sages go on liv¬
ing, begetting children, perpetuating the race. The mean¬
ing of life, if there is one, says Tolstoy, must be found in
these ordinary souls and not in the great intellects of the
race. Whatever ultimate meaning there is is vital and not
rational. The peasantry are wiser in their ignorance than
the savants of St. Petersburg in their learning.

146

ERRATIONAIj man

My Confession is not the argument of a professional phi¬
losopher, but it is a powerful act of thinking (to which no
summary can do justice) nonetheless, and a great work of
art to boot. In it, as in his greatest novels, we encounter
that peculiarly Tolstoyan power to cut through all artifices
and complications in order to come directly to the heart of
his matter. Is not this a power not only of art but of
thought? And perhaps as valid as a means to truth as the
ingenious dialectic of any philosopher?

All the foregoing refugees from Laputa, though they
differ widely in temperament and literary art, come to¬
gether in a remarkable way in their criticism of modem life
and the peculiar threat it raises to the being of man. They
make an impressive group of witnesses, and their testimony
can be dismissed out of court as the aberration of poets
only by those Platonic (or Laputan) intellectuals who have
already excluded poetry from their ideal Republic. The
historians of ideas have acquired a magical belief in labels
not unlike the old magical belief in spells; they seem to
think that they need only apply the proper rubrics—
“Romanticism,” “Irrationalism,” “Symbolism,” “the Russian
soul,” or what not—to conjure away the realities with which
these writers dealt, much as the medieval bishop thought
he could exterminate the vermin simply by excommunicat¬
ing them. The work of all these writers pointed to some¬
thing that was happening to Western man that could not
be arrested; something of such power and momentum that
it had eventually to erupt into philosophy itself. This erup¬
tion took place in the existential philosophers, to whom we
now come. The malaise of poets over the last hundred and
fifty years, far from being the itch of merely personal neu¬
rosis, discloses rather the human climate in which philoso¬
phers too, whether they knew it or not, drew their breath.

THE EXISTENTIALISTS

Part Three

KIERKEGAARD

Chapter Seven

“It was intelligence ,” Kierkegaard says, writing of him¬
self and his task in his Journals—“it was intelligence and
nothing else that had to be opposed. Presumably that is
why I, who had the job, was armed with an immense in¬
telligence.” This is the candid statement of genius about it¬
self, without boast and without false modesty. Kierkegaard
does not disparage intelligence; quite the contrary, he
speaks of it with respect and even reverence. But nonethe¬
less, at a certain moment in history this intelligence had to
be opposed, and opposed with all the resources and powers
of a man of brilliant intelligence. No better summation can
be made of what Kierkegaard had to do and what he
accomplished.

Of the immensity of his intelligence there can be no
doubt. The fecundity of his mind astounds us each time we
return to his writings. A century after he wrote, we are still
in the process of gamering, sifting, and trying to systema¬
tize the insights he strewed so profusely through his pages.
He wrote at breakneck speed, his mind in a kind of feverish
blaze, bursting with ideas of which sometimes only a dart¬
ing gleam or glint could be got down on the page. Hence
the discontinuities and shifts in so much of his writing, the
tacks and turns, asides and parables, in which the slower
mind of the reader may sometimes get lost. The power of
Kierkegaard’s almost febrile intelligence was such that it
was capable of devouring the life of its possessor by turning
almost every experience into reflection. But, unlike so many

IRRATIONAL MAN

150

great minds, Kierkegaard was aware of this in himself, and
so forewarned against the subtle and omnivorous depreda¬
tions of his intellect. His intellectual power, he knew, was
also his cross. Without faith, which the intelligence can
never supply, he would have died inside his mind, a sickly
and paralyzed Hamlet.

As the nineteenth century recedes, the foothills that close
up had seemed to tower fall into proper perspective and
the true heights rise more starkly. More and more, for us
today, Kierkegaard begins to be visible above his century,
a solitary peak but central to the whole chain. And this
belated fame, in a century that has departed as far from
him almost as it has from the Middle Ages, is a paradox,
as was the man himself. Certain great German forerunners
of Kierkegaard had also attempted a critique of the intel¬
ligence; and earlier opponents of rationalism, men like
Hamann and the later Schelling, had spoken out forcefully
for the instinctive, the intuitive, the mythical against a
time that seemed no longer able even to understand such
things. By comparison with the German Romanticists Kier¬
kegaard traced a much narrower orbit in his writings; but
the narrower the orbit, the closer we are to the center, hence
the less energy lost on matters peripheral. Justice Holmes
once remarked that the hallmark of genius, in a great
lawyer or jurist, was his ability to cut through technicalities
and go for the jugular. Kierkegaard’s one theme and his
one passion was Christianity, but Christianity embraced
neither speculatively nor romantically; his concern, rather,
was with what it means concretely for the individual to be
a Christian. The central fact for the nineteenth century, as
Kierkegaard (and after him Nietzsche, from a diametrically
opposite point of view) saw it, was that this civilization
that had once been Christian was so no longer. It had been
a civilization that revolved around the figure of Christ, and
was now, in Nietzsche’s image, like a planet detaching it¬
self from its sun; and of this the civilization was not yet
aware. In contrast with this great historical datum, this
fork in the road for the whole of mankind and not just for
its savants, most of the questions debated by philosophers

KIERKEGAARD

151

—the nature of sense-data, perception, judgment, canons of
induction and deduction, and the rest—look like what they
are, mandarin pastimes. The thinker whose thought is cen¬
tral, however, is always attuned to some urgent question of
his time of which the time itself is not aware. In Holmes’s
brutal and telling phrase, Kierkegaard (like Nietzsche
after him) goes for the jugular. That is one explanation of
his power over us today.

1. THE MAN HIMSELF

Kierkegaard, of course, never put to himself the question
of his own relevance to his time in this speculative and de¬
tached way. He did not take up the problem of Christianity
because history, civilization, and Western man were at
issue. That would have been something for the professional
speculators, the learned Privatdocenten and professors of
philosophy, to deal with. The problem for Kierkegaard was
throughout a personal one: he had chosen to be a Christian,
and he had constantly to renew that choice, with all the
energy and passion of his being. All that he thought and
wrote shows this personal cast. He called his book Fear and
Trembling “a dialectical lyric,” and the phrase would in
fact be a good description of nearly all his writing. His
thought was the lyric of Kierkegaard the man: frankly and
avowedly an act of self-expression. For all its lyricism, how¬
ever, it has its own subtlety, exactness, and dialectical
acumen. Indeed, the thought of the “subjective thinker,”
as Kierkegaard called himself, always has its own rigor, dis¬
tinct from that of the objective theorist. Kierkegaard does
not merely tell us that being precedes thought, or that all
thought is an expression of some concrete being; he shows
us this truth in the flesh, as it were, by showing us a
thought that is without disguise an act of being, i.e., of his
own personal and passionate existence. He never aimed at
being a philosopher and all his philosophy was indeed in¬
cidental to his main purpose, to show what it means to be
a Christian; just as this was in turn incidental to his own
personal task in life—that of becoming one.

152

IRRATIONAL MAN

The reader who wishes to understand Kierkegaard ought
to begin with his purely devotional works, such as Train¬
ing in Christianity or Works of Love, which he signed with
his own name and not with pseudonyms; in these the true
center both of his life and of his work resides. The ultimate
source of Kierkegaard’s power over us today lies neither in
his own intelligence nor in his battle against the imperialism
of intelligence—to use the formula with which we began—
but in the religious and human passion of the man himself,
from which the intelligence takes fire and acquires all its
meaning. This still can arouse us today to the problem of
our own subjectivity. We open a book, as Pascal says, ex¬
pecting to encounter an author, and we meet a man. Even
to those for whom Christianity is a mournful echo of a dead
past, Kierkegaard still can make, in Karl Jaspers’ phrase, an
appeal to their own existence. Being a Christian, after all,
is one way of being a man—for Kierkegaard personally it
was the only way—and to have this way illumined, to be
summoned to its tasks, is also to be called on to be a man,
however divergent our own choice of a way may be.

Kierkegaard the man, however, is not an ingratiating
figure in everyone’s eyes. During his own lifetime he met
with an unfriendly press and he is not exactly without one
even now. He was a bizarre and eccentric figure, to be sure,
and his physical appearance was no help to him in his
native city of Copenhagen, where the street urchins used
to run after him yelling “Either/or! Either/orl” He had
fine eyes, but there the attractive features ended; a spindly
figure, a humped back, and a tousled head of hair made
him look altogether rather like a scarecrow. He accepted
his ill-favored body, however, with what seems to have
been wry good humor; it was his first instruction in comic
irony, so important a weapon later in his intellectual ar¬
senal, for here was irony close to home in the disproportion
between this frail and ungainly body and the infinite claims
of the spirit which it housed. He always was able there¬
after to see comedy and pathos together as one human side
of religion.

If his fellow townsmen held his odd physical appearance

KIEIIKEGAAHD

153

against him, subsequent critics have dealt almost as harshly
with the personality behind this unprepossessing exterior.
“Kierkegaard the cripple!” is a phrase invoked not merely
against the man’s body but against his spirit too. Recent
psychoanalytic critics have clumsily wielded their scalpels
upon him in an effort to cut the man down to size—in order,
apparently, to cut down his thought. Much too much mys¬
tification has been made of one decisive event, of a hu¬
man and emotional nature, in a life that was otherwise one
of dedicated uneventfulness: his becoming engaged to, and
subsequently breaking off with, Regina Olsen. If Kierke¬
gaard had not been an existential thinker, his broken en¬
gagement would now be only a subject for gossip; but man
and thinker being one, in his case, the incident does in fact
shed a great light on his thought and is worth going into
if only to clear up some of the mystification.

Why Kierkegaard should have broken this engagement
should not be such a mystery when he himself put forward
pretty adequate reasons for doing so. To make it a mystery
that can only be explained by some unspoken and unspeak¬
able blight within his character is simply to cast doubt on
there being such a thing as a religious personality for which
the ordinary life of marriage and family is impossible,
simply because it has other tasks. The religious type may
seem an abnormal one, to our secular and naturalistic
minds; but there it is, it exists, and in sufficient plenty
throughout history. Only a very parochial and dogmatic
mind can fail to accord to this type at the least its own
psychological right to be. Kierkegaard’s case, to be sure,
was complicated because he himself longed passionately for
marriage, home, family—the blisses and the tedium of the
commonplace; his writings are packed with eulogies of
these. His most touching picture of the man of faith is of
an ordinary bourgeois paterfamilias sunk deep in the life
of domesticity. Naturally, then, he never ceased to regret
the loss of Regina; for him it was a sacrifice as drastic as
Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, his firstborn; and Kierkegaard
had personal as well as religious motives in exploring, in
Fear and Trembling, that old Biblical story. In a moment

154

IRRATIONAL MAN

of melancholy in his Journals, he even goes so far as to say:
“If I had faith, I would have stayed with Regina”—a re¬
mark of immediate and momentary grief that has given
some suspicious critics grounds for crowing over the lack
of genuineness of Kierkegaard’s faith. But what his remark
really means is that the loss of Regina was a painful loss,
and therefore that the choice not to have her was a decisive
choice, which in fact split the man in two and had to be
met ultimately as a choice of himself. Here the philosophi¬
cal and personal meanings of this episode meet and be¬
come one.

Had he given up the girl and sunk into an aimless and
irreligious life, we would be justified in finding his renun¬
ciation only an act of impotent neurosis. At the moment
of renunciation, indeed, there flashed before Kierkegaard’s
mind another pair of alternatives: a life of unbridled
sensuality or an absolutely religious one. We who are able
to look back on his life spread out before us as a whole
are not likely to believe that this first alternative was really
possible for Kierkegaard. He had the vocation from the
start—to be sure, it was a mixed, tormented, and ambiguous
vocation, but a triumphant one too. He chose what he had
to become. This does not in the least mean that it was not
a free choice; on the contrary, it had to be renewed freely
day by day, throughout the rest of his life, if it were to be
given meaning. Kierkegaard was, that is, what he had to
be; but he had to be it by making the free choice every
day to renew that choice. “I cannot do otherwise,” said
Martin Luther at the moment of performing what was the
highest act of freedom of his life. If a man who wants to
get married but cannot converts his renunciation into a
dedication and an eventual triumph, we cannot then judge
the value and the meaning of his life—including as it now
does that act of renunciation—by the categories of neurosis.

Having lived through the breaking of his engagement,
Kierkegaard could not ever become a Hegelian. The drastic
Either/Or of choice had cut through his life as decisively
as a sword, and no philosopher’s balm could remove the
pain of loss. The man who has chosen irrevocably, whose

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155

choice has once and for all sundered him from a certain
possibility for himself and his life, is thereby thrown back
on the reality of that self in all its mortality and finitude.
He is no longer a spectator of himself as a mere possibility;
he is that self in its reality. The anguish of loss may be
redeemed, but can never be mediated. Reality for the man
who has been called upon to make such a choice is just
the reality of his own mortal, finite, bleeding self, and this
reality can never be absorbed in a whole in which that
finite suffering becomes unreal. The Absolute of Hegel em¬
braces all reality and swallows up every contradiction and
every finite evil. It is, as it were, the philosophic counter¬
part of that great Crystal Palace from which every shadow
or dark spot of our ordinary human reality has been cast
out. When Lear cries out in that appalling line, “Never,
never, never, never, never!” he is naming just that reality
of the negative which we as finite mortals cannot escape.
But in the philosophy of Hegel the negative is not ulti¬
mately real, for the Absolute Reality is pure and positive
being. Kierkegaard, of course, being thoroughly human,
hoped that his loss would be made good, that Regina might
be restored to him; but he knew this could only be through
a miracle of faith. The cosmic rationalism of Hegel would
have told him his loss was not a real loss but only the ap¬
pearance of loss, but this would have been an abominable
insult to his suffering.

Kierkegaard already knew all this, but the experience of
the broken engagement clinched it for him. The episode
of the engagement thus becomes a human drama in which
the ultimate meaning is religious and philosophical. For
the thinker, as for the artist, what counts in life is not the
number of rare and exciting adventures he encounters, but
the inner depth in that life, by which something great may
be made out of even the paltriest and most banal of
occurrences.

Kierkegaard has been criticized as being overmelan¬
choly, excessively introverted, even morbid—a Hamlet more
brooding than the original Dane. Melancholy he certainly
was, and the Journals abound in sighs, tears, and self-

IRRATIONAL MAN

156

laceration. But what is a journal for if not to unburden one¬
self? One is expected, out of good breeding, to refrain from
weeping and sighing in public, but is one also expected to
keep on one’s social mask while writing in a diary? The
remarkable thing about Kierkegaard was that the cloud of
sighs and tears he shed never got in the way of his seeing
what he was after: no man ever hewed more strictly to the
line of his own truth. His melancholy, moreover, was
lightened by humor and irony, and a wonderful sense of
the beauties of homely life. Kierkegaard was indeed one of
the most intensely introverted of men, and even of writers.
But introversion and extraversion, as Jung suggests, are not
at all of our choosing; and the rosiest extravert is just as
effectively imprisoned in his own centrifugal self as the in¬
trovert is in his centripetal one. Kierkegaard was able to
make a very great deal out of his tendency to morbid
introspection. He was aware of his own self-imprisonment
and was able to see its conditions more clearly than any
religious writer before him.

Kierkegaard succeeded, in Nietzsche’s words, in be¬
coming the individual he was; analysis of him will not ad¬
vance our understanding if it attempts, in a kind of critical
daydream, to transform him into some altogether different
individual. Rather than try to explain Kierkegaard away, it
might be better to allow him now to explain himself.

2. SOCRATES AND HEGEL; EXIST¬
ENCE AND REASON

His own explanation of his point of departure as a
thinker is given in a characteristically vivid and Kierke-
gaardian passage in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
While he sat one Sunday afternoon in the Fredriksberg
Garden in Copenhagen smoking a cigar as was his habit,
and turning over a great many things in his mind, he sud¬
denly reflected that he had as yet made no career for him¬
self whereas everywhere around him he saw the men of his
age becoming celebrated, establishing themselves as re¬
nowned benefactors of mankind. They were benefactors be-

KIERKEGAARD

157

cause all their efforts were directed at making life easier
for the rest of mankind, whether materially by constructing
railroads, steamboats, or telegraph lines, or intellectually by
publishing easy compendiums to universal knowledge, or—
most audacious of all—spiritually by showing how thought
itself could make spiritual existence systematically easier
and easier. Kierkegaard’s cigar burned down, he lighted an¬
other, the train of reflection held him. It occurred to him
then that since everyone was engaged everywhere in mak¬
ing things easy, perhaps someone might be needed to make
things hard again; that life might become so easy that
people would want the difficult back again; and that this
might be a career and destiny for him.

The irony is delicious and thoroughly Socratic, and ap¬
propriately so, since the task it marked out for Kierkegaard
was parallel to that of Socrates. As the ancient Socrates
played the gadfly for his fellow Athenians stinging them
into awareness of their own ignorance, so Kierkegaard
would find his task, he told himself, in raising difficulties for
the easy conscience of an age that was smug in the con¬
viction of its own material progress and intellectual en¬
lightenment. He would be a modem and Christian gadfly
as Socrates had been an ancient and pagan one.

Now, it was no accident that the name of Socrates came
to Kierkegaard’s mind in his meditation on his life’s task.
The ancient Greek sage held a special place in his affec¬
tions, due not only to the power of the Socratic personality
but also to basic philosophic principle. In his estimate of
Socrates, as on most other points, Kierkegaard is the dia¬
metrical opposite of Nietzsche: the two agree only in the
importance they attach to the gadfly of Athens. Kierke¬
gaard was interested not at all in the Socrates who figures
in some of Plato’s writings as the mouthpiece of Platonism;
his attachment rather was to the man Socrates, the con¬
crete man of flesh and blood, who said that he had no
system or doctrine to teach, that in fact he had no knowl¬
edge of his own, but could only play the midwife to other
men in bringing to birth the knowledge they had within
themselves. In comparison with a modem philosopher like

IRRATIONAL MAN

158

Hegel, who claims to have knowledge of the whole of
reality or at least can find a place for everything within
his System, old Socrates would seem to cut a very poor
figure indeed. However, if philosophy is, as the etymology
of the word signifies, the love of wisdom, then Socrates was
a genuine philosopher—a lover of wisdom—even though he
did not claim to know about this love. We do not ordinarily
say a man is a lover even if he knows all about love, un¬
less he does in fact love. And indeed the more he loves, the
less confidence he is likely to have in any theory about
love. For Socrates philosophy was a way of life, and he
existed in that way. Since he did not profess to have any
theory of philosophy, he did not accept pay as a professor.
He could teach only by example, and what Kierkegaard
learned from the example of Socrates became fundamental
for his own thinking: namely, that existence and a theory
about existence are not one and the same, any more than
a printed menu is as effective a form of nourishment as an
actual meal. More than that: the possession of a theory
about existence may intoxicate the possessor to such a
degree that he forgets the need of existence altogether. The
lover may become more fascinated by his theory about love
than by the person of the beloved, and so cease to love.
There is, in short, a fundamental discrepancy between
existence and theory; and this discrepancy Kierkegaard
proceeded to explore in a way more radical than had hith¬
erto been done in Western thought.

In the course of this exploration he had to engage in a
sweeping polemic against Hegelian philosophy. We miss
altogether the point of this polemic, however, if we think
of it as merely a local skirmish against an odd and now
outdated system of thought. Kierkegaard fought against the
Hegelian climate of his time, but the ultimate issues were
neither local nor temporary because in these issues Hegel
was simply the spokesman for the whole tradition of West¬
ern philosophy. Hegel was not an odd lunatic, as some
people nowadays think, but a very great philosopher;
Kierkegaard was a greater man, however, and for that rea¬
son, if for no other, was able to catch Hegel out. What

KIERKEGAARD

159

strikes us today as extreme, audacious, or even crazy in
what Hegel says often seems so only because he was speak¬
ing aloud what had been the hidden presuppositions of
Western philosophy since its very beginning with the
Greeks. When Hegel says, “The Real is rational, and the
rational is real,” we might at first think that only a German
idealist with his head in the clouds, forgetful of our earthly
existence, could so far forget all the discords, gaps, and
imperfections in our ordinary experience. But the belief in
a completely rational cosmos lies behind the Western phil¬
osophic tradition; at the very dawn of this tradition Par¬
menides stated it in his famous verse, “It is the same thing
that can be thought and that can be.” What cannot be
thought, Parmenides held, cannot be real. If existence can¬
not be thought, but only lived, then reason has no other
recourse than to leave existence out of its picture of reality.
As the French scientist and philosopher Emile Meyerson
says, reason has only one means of accounting for what
does not come from itself, and that is to reduce it to noth¬
ingness. Which is exactly what Parmenides did, and what
philosophers after him continued to do. The process is still
going on today, in somewhat more subtle fashion, under the
names of science and Positivism, and without invoking the
blessing of Hegel at all.

Hegel’s peculiar offense lay not in following the tradition
by leaving existence out of his system, but rather in the
way in which he tried to bring it in, having begun by ex¬
cluding it. At law, I suppose, this would come under the
heading of a compound felony. All his philosophical prede¬
cessors, or nearly all of them, had committed the theft, but
poor Hegel was caught in the act of trying to restore the
misappropriated article. The means he chose were most
unfortunate: he tried to bring back existence through logic.
Reason, become omnipotent, would generate existence out
of itself 1 Even here, Hegel was not really flying in the
face of tradition, as it might seem; he was only giving a
more audacious expression to the overinflation of reason
and its powers that had been the peculiar professional de¬
formation of almost all earlier philosophers. This conjuring

i6o

IRRATIONAL MAN

up of existence, like a rabbit out of a hat, Hegel accom¬
plished by means of his famous dialectic, the instrument
Marx later turned with such devastating results upon social
and economic history. We begin, says Hegel, with the con¬
cept of Being, a pure empty concept without existence;
this begets its opposite, Nothing, and out of the pair comes
the mediating and reconciling concept that is the synthesis
of both. This process goes on until at the proper stage of
the dialectic we reach the level of Reality, which is to say.
Existence. The details of the derivation we need not go into
here; what concerns us is the general structure of Hegel’s
argument, through which thought begets existence. It does
not require much imagination to see the human implica¬
tions of this sample of Hegelian dialectic.

There was nothing recondite about the kind of existence
for which Kierkegaard, in refuting Hegel, fought such a
brilliant and passionate battle. It was indeed our ordinary
human existence—concrete, personal, and finite—which he
saw reason on the point of ingesting into itself. Reason’s
offense was a religious one, to Kierkegaard, because Chris¬
tianity for him was through and through a personalistic
religion, depending on an historical incarnation and an
historical revelation, and could not be understood purely
under the aspect of eternity. Hegel, on the other hand, still
called himself a Christian but believed that philosophy en¬
compassed religion and made the religious truth a mere
symbolic approximation to itself. If Hegel had recognized,
and admitted, that he had actually passed out of Christi¬
anity, the matter would stand differently, and one could let
the whole Hegelian System pass unchallenged as a mag¬
nificent jeu d’esprit, an exuberant display of dialectical
virtuosity. But Hegelianism threatens Christians more than
does any professedly anti-Christian philosophy, because the
System can only lead to confusion and misunderstanding
as to what Christianity really is, and therefore to self-
deception among those who continue to believe they are
Christians when in fact they are not. Better to be a non-
Christian and know it than to be a non-Christian and not

KIERKEGAARD l6l

know it—so any honest disciple of Socrates would be com¬
pelled to point out.

If Kierkegaard had merely argued, against Hegel, that
existence cannot be derived from reason, he would have
gone no farther than some other schools of modem philoso¬
phy whose thought does not move beyond the sphere of
logic. But Kierkegaard did in fact go much farther than
this; and to see where he stood on the relation of reason to
existence, we have to see him in a broader philosophical
context, one that lies outside his particular relation to
Hegel.

Kant, before Hegel, had made a statement on the subject
of existence and reason that has become decisive for mod¬
em philosophy. Kant declared, in effect, that existence can
never be conceived by reason—though the conclusions he
drew from this fact were very different from Kierkegaard’s.
“Being,” says Kant, “is evidently not a real predicate, or
concept of something that can be added to the concept of
a thing,” That is, if I think of a thing, and then think of
that thing as existing, my second concept does not add any
determinate characteristic to the first. Kant gives the ex¬
ample of the concept of a hundred dollars; if I think of a
hundred real dollars and a hundred possible dollars, my
concept is still of one hundred dollars, not a cent more nor
less. To be sure, in the order of existence and not of con¬
cepts, there is a world of difference between the real and
the merely possible: a hundred real dollars will make me
a hundred dollars richer, while a hundred possible dollars
leave my financial position exactly where it was. But that
is in life and not in thought. So far as thinking is concerned,
there is no definite note or characteristic by which, in a
concept, I can represent existence as such.

Now when Kant made this point, he was speaking, or
intended to speak, from the more positivistic and scientific
side of his philosophy. From the point of view of theoreti¬
cal knowledge existence is negligible, because knowledge
wants to know about a thing, and the fact that it exists
does not tell me anything about it. Ultimately, what I want
to know about the thing is what characterizes it in the way

162

IRRATIONAL MAN

of definite observable qualities; and existence, far from
being an observable quality, is in fact too general, remote,
and tenuous a property to be represented at all to the mind.
Hence, all modem Positivism takes its cue from Kant’s doc¬
trine and discards all thinking about existence (metaphys¬
ics, as this school calls it) as pointless because existence
cannot be represented in a concept, and hence thinking
about it will never lead to any definite results in observa¬
tion. The crossroad in modern philosophy is precisely here,
and Kierkegaard takes a road leading in the opposite direc¬
tion from that taken by Positivism. If existence cannot be
represented in a concept, he says, it is not because it is too
general, remote, and tenuous a thing to be conceived of
but rather because it is too dense, concrete, and rich. I am;
and this fact that I exist is so compelling and enveloping
a reality that it cannot be reproduced thinly in any of my
mental concepts, though it is clearly the life-and-death fact
without which all my concepts would be void.

Kant can justly be called the father of modem philoso¬
phy, for out of him stem nearly all the still current and
contending schools of philosophy: Positivism, Pragmatism,
and Existentialism. The difference between Positivism and
Existentialism, to confine ourselves to these two, can be seen
simply as the different response to Kant’s point that exist¬
ence cannot be a concept.

And this difference makes all the difference. Philosophers
before Kierkegaard had speculated about the proposition
“I exist,” but it was he who observed the cmcial fact they
had forgotten; namely, that my own existence is not at all
a matter of speculation to me, but a reality in which I am
personally and passionately involved. I do not find this
existence reflected in the mirror of the mind, I encounter it
in life; it is my life, a current flowing invisibly around all
my mental mirrors. But if existence is not mirrored as a
concept in the mind, where then do we really come to
grips with it? For Kierkegaard this decisive encounter with
the Self lies in the Either/Or of choice. When he gave up
Regina, thus forever giving up the solaces of ordinary life
for which he longed, Kierkegaard was encountering his

KIERXEGAAHD

163

own existence as a reality more potent and drastic than any
concept. And so any man who chooses or is forced to choose
decisively—for a lifetime, and therefore for eternity since
only one life is given us—experiences his own existence as
something beyond the mirror of thought. He encounters the
Self that he is, not in the detachment of thought, but in
the involvement and pathos of choice.

3 . AESTHETIC, ETHICAL, RELIGIOUS

To make his position clear, Kierkegaard elaborated three
levels of existence—the aesthetic, ethical, and religious—
and his clarification of these levels represents one of his
most significant contributions to philosophy.

The child is the perfect and complete aesthete, in terms
of this distinction, for the child fives solely in the pleasure
or pain of the moment. Some people do grow up retaining
something of this childlike immediacy of response, this
capacity for existing in the moment. They are sometimes
beautiful to watch, these immediate ones, says Kierkegaard,
as they glow in the moment responding to some simple
and beautiful object with all the grace of their nature and
their blood. They are also thrown as quickly and immedi¬
ately into despair if the flower that delights them fades.
The aesthete, in the stricter sense, is someone who chooses
to five solely for such privileged and pleasurable moments.
Kierkegaard explores the aesthetic attitude with great sub¬
tlety and sympathy; but, he says, in the end it must collapse
into despair. Ancient Epicureanism shows this, for it is
haunted by the images of despair that it has sought to
banish from its thinking. The most beautiful Epicurean
poems of the Greeks and the Romans are always haunted
by sadness: there is a grinning skull behind the flowers.
Lucretius, the greatest poet of Epicureanism, has the pas¬
sion of madness, and the tradition is that he did toward the
end of his fife go mad. Life yields so many weeds along
with its flowers that the man who has staked his whole fife
on its pleasurable moments has to become desperate in his
search for them, as Don Juan becomes desperate in his

164

IRRATIONAL MAN

search for new loves. The aesthete is driven into a panicky
flight from the prospect of boredom, and this flight—which
is in fact a flight from himself—becomes his form of despera¬
tion and therefore of despair.

Kierkegaard’s treatment of the aesthetic is given a new
and radical twist when he extends the attitude to include
also that of the intellectual “aesthete,” the contemplative
who tries to stand outside life and behold it as a spectacle.
The word “aesthetic” comes from the Greek verb meaning
to sense or perceive; it has the same root as the word
“theory” and the word “theater.” At a theater we view
spectacles in which we ourselves are not involved. The
spectacle may be either interesting or boring, and the “in¬
teresting” and the “boring” are the dominant categories un¬
der which the aesthete views all experience. The intellectual
who looks at things with detachment, the philosopher who
claims to be the spectator of all time and existence—both
are fundamentally aesthetes in their attitude. Here Kierke¬
gaard attacks what had been held to be the highest value
in the tradition of Western philosophy, the thinker’s specu¬
lative detachment from life; in so doing he laid down what
was to be a cardinal point in all the subsequent existential
philosophies. Plato, Spinoza, and the others were aesthetes
without knowing it.

The aesthetic attitude can be only a partial, never a com¬
plete, attitude toward life. Kierkegaard does not discard it,
but preserves it within the more integrated and total at¬
titude that must supplant it as we become more seriously
involved with ourselves and our life. Thus the three “stages
on life’s way,” as Kierkegaard calls them, are not to be
taken as different floors of a building; if I rise from the
aesthetic to the ethical it does not mean that I have left
the lower floor entirely behind me. Rather, both attitudes
are stages on the way from the periphery to the center of
the self, and the periphery is still preserved even when we
have learned to dwell a little closer to our center. The fact
is that the aesthete, at the very moment of choosing the
aesthetic way of life, contradicts himself and enters upon
the ethical. He chooses himself and his life, resolutely and

KIERKEGAARD

165

consciously in the face of the death that will come as cer¬
tain; and his choice, by its very consciousness and resolute¬
ness, is a piece of finite pathos in the face of the vast noth¬
ingness stretching before and after his life. The aesthete
may not wish to dwell on this somber background to his
choice, but that background is surely there even if we, to
use Tolstoy’s phrase, are not able to stand face to face with
it. It is thus by an act of courage that we begin to exist
ethically. We bind ourselves to ourselves for a lifetime.

Does Kierkegaard add anything, by this, to the tradi¬
tional discussions of ethics by philosophers? I think he does;
and it may take philosophy a long time to absorb the full
import of what he has to say about the ethical as a level
of our human existence. In the traditional kind of ethics
philosophers are concerned with analyzing the concepts of
good, bad, right, and wrong, and with deciding to which
things or kinds of things these predicates may be attached.
This is a purely formal land of analysis; indeed, in modem
times philosophers have shifted their inquiry to an analysis
of the language of ethics. Such linguistic analysis does not
in the least require that the man who makes it himself
exist ethically. It is thus perfectly possible—and in fact
often happens—that a philosopher who has worked out a
complete theory of values in the abstract may yet remain
in a childish or donnish existence that has never felt the
bite of the ethical upon it. One’s values may thus be all
down on paper, but one’s actual life goes on as if the ethical
did not exist. A formal theory of ethics would be perfectly
empty if it were not for the fundamental act of ethical ex¬
istence by which we let values come into our life. The
fundamental choice, says Kierkegaard, is not the choice be¬
tween rival values of good and bad, but the choice by
which we summon good and bad into existence for our¬
selves. Without such a choice, an abstract system of ethics
is just so much paper currency with nothing to back it up.

Kierkegaard speaks often of the ethico-religious, as if the
two levels of existence were one; and for a mind so abrupt
and powerful as his there is no doubt that it was a single
leap from the aesthetic into the religious. For a really pas-

i66

IRRATIONAXj man

sionate temperament that has renounced the life of pleas¬
ure, the consolations of the ethical are a warmed-over
substitute at best. Why burden ourselves with conscience
and responsibility when we are going to die, and that will
be the end of it? Kierkegaard would have approved of the
feeling behind Nietzsche’s saying, “God is dead, everything
is permitted,” and he himself was fascinated by the bold
amoral figure of the Seducer or Don Juan who, though
secretly in despair, is at least living passionately. He never
wearies of telling us that what is at stake in Christianity is
our own eternal happiness and not the maintenance of a
morality that may be socially desirable or is at least socially
approved.

The real fine of difference between the ethical and the
religious Kierkegaard draws in his Fear and Trembling,
and it has to do with the uniqueness of the individual, the
singleness of the single one, and with the calling of the
religious man, who has to break with the ordinary moral
code that his fellow citizens approve. He uses the example
of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac, but he has in mind
throughout himself and his sacrifice of Regina. An ethical
rule, he says, expresses itself as a universal: all men under
such-and-such circumstances ought to do such and such.
But the religious personality may be called upon to do
something that goes against the universal norm. All men
ought to cherish and preserve the lives of their sons; but
Abraham is called by God to sacrifice Isaac his son. This
calling is anguish, for Abraham is suspended between the
fear of disobeying God and the doubt that this call may
be from Him—he feels it may instead be the demoniacal
voice of pride asking for a sacrifice that need not be made.
So Kierkegaard could never be sure, when he broke his en¬
gagement to take up the cross of his religious life, that he
was choosing rightly and not succumbing to some demonia¬
cal egotism. How does this break with the ethical differ, if
at all, from that advocated by Dostoevski’s Raskolnikov
and by Nietzsche, who said the superior individual, the
Superman, is justified in breaking any moral rule he wishes
in order to advance his own power? The difference is that

KIERXEGAABD

167

Kierkegaard does not deny the validity of the ethical: the
individual who is called upon to break with the ethical
must first have subordinated himself to the ethical univer¬
sal; and the break, when he is called upon to make it, is
made in fear and trembling and not in the callous arrogance
of power. The validity of this break with the ethical is
guaranteed, if it ever is, by only one principle, which is
central to Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy as well as to
his Christian faith—the principle, namely, that the individ¬
ual is higher than the universal. (This means also that the
individual is always of higher value than the collective.)
The universal rule of ethics, precisely because it is univer¬
sal, cannot comprehend totally me, the individual, in my
concreteness. Where then as an abstract rule it commands
something that goes against my deepest self (but it has to
be my deepest self, and herein the fear and trembling of
the choice reside), then I feel compelled out of conscience
—a religious conscience superior to the ethical—to transcend
that rule. I am compelled to make an exception because
I myself am an exception; that is, a concrete being whose
existence can never be completely subsumed under any
universal or even system of universals.

Now, Abraham and Kierkegaard were both in excep¬
tional situations; most of us are not called upon to make
such drastic sacrifices. But even the most ordinary people
are required from time to time to make decisions crucial
for their own lives, and in such crises they know something
of the “suspension of the ethical” of which Kierkegaard
writes. For the choice in such human situations is almost
never between a good and an evil, where both are plainly
marked as such and the choice therefore made in all the
certitude of reason; rather it is between rival goods, where
one is bound to do some evil either way, and where the
ultimate outcome and even—or most of all—our own motives
are unclear to us. The terror of confronting oneself in such
a situation is so great that most people panic and try to
take cover under any universal rule that will apply, if only
it will save them from the task of choosing themselves. Un¬
fortunately, in a good many cases there is no such universal

i68

IRRATIONAL MAN

rule or recipe available, and the individual can do nothing
but muddle through on his own and decide for himself.
Life seems to have intended it this way, for no moral blue¬
print has ever been drawn up that covers all the situations
for us beforehand so that we can be absolutely certain un¬
der which rule the situation comes. Such is the concrete¬
ness of existence that a situation may come under several
rules at once, forcing us to choose outside any rule, and
from inside ourselves. The most exhaustive ethical blueprint
ever drawn up is the system of moral theology of the
Catholic Church; and yet the Church has to supplement
this by casuistry and the confessional.

Most people, of course, do not want to recognize that
in certain crises they are being brought face to face with
the religious center of their existence. Such crises are simply
painful and must be got through as quickly and easily as
one can. Why, in any case, should the discovery of the
religious come to us at the moment in which we feel most
sundered and alone, as Abraham did on Mount Moriah or
as Kierkegaard did face to face with his own deprivation?
Kierkegaard’s answer to this is pretty traditional: “The fear
of the Lord,” says the Bible, “is the beginning of wisdom”;
and for modem man, before that fear and as a threshold
to it, are the fear and trembling in which we begin to be
a Self.

That Kierkegaard, as a psychologist of religious experi¬
ence—as such he is without peer—dwells so much upon
emotions like fear and trembling, anxiety or dread, and
despair is often taken as an indication of the excessive mor¬
bidity of his temperament. Kierkegaard does show a cer¬
tain predilection for these moods, admittedly, or let us say
at least that in dealing with them he is at his most potent,
both dramatically and dialectically. What is important,
however, is that there is no morbidity, no tinge either of
exaggeration or sensationalism, in his treatment of these
moods. Such moods are a part of life—a larger part than we
modems like to believe—and Kierkegaard chooses to face
up to them. If the abstractness of modem society can be
said to lead to a repression of all the emotions, certainly

KIERKEGAARD

169

the most deeply repressed are those we call “negative.” The
“positive” emotions such as love or joy lend themselves to
all kinds of sentimental caricatures in popular art, which
are probably more damaging to the spirit than outright
repression of such feelings would be. But what love does
not know the ache of fear, what joy is not tinged with re¬
gret? Modem man is farther from the truth of his own
emotions than the primitive. When we banish the shudder
of fear, the rising of the hair of the flesh in dread, or the
shiver of awe, we shall have lost the emotion of the holy
altogether.

The most powerful of Kierkegaard’s distinctly psycholog¬
ical treatises is probably The Sickness Unto Death, a study
of the various modalities of despair. Despair is the sickness
unto death, the sickness in which we long to die but cannot
die; thus, it is the extreme emotion in which we seek to
escape from ourselves, and it is precisely this latter aspect
of despair that makes it such a powerful revelation of what
it means to exist as a human individual. We are all in de¬
spair, consciously or unconsciously, according to Kierke¬
gaard, and every means we have of coping with this de¬
spair, short of religion, is either unsuccessful or demoniacal.
Kierkegaard advances two general principles that are in
advance of nearly all current psychologies: (1) Despair is
never ultimately over the external object but always over
ourselves. A girl loses her sweetheart, and falls into despair;
it is not over the lost sweetheart that she despairs, but over
herself-without-the-sweetheart: that is, she can no longer
escape from herself into the thought or person of the be¬
loved. And so on, for all cases of loss, whether it be money,
power, or social rank. The unbearable loss is not really in
itself unbearable; what we cannot bear is that in being
stripped of an external object we stand denuded and see
the intolerable abyss of the self yawn at our feet. (2) The
condition we call a sickness in certain people is, at its cen¬
ter, a form of sinfulness. We are in the habit nowadays of
labeling morally deficient people as sick, mentally sick, or
neurotic. This is true if we look at the neurotic from out¬
side: his neurosis is indeed a sickness, for it prevents him

170

IRRATIONAL MAN

from functioning as he should, either totally or in some
particular area of life. But the closer we get to any neurotic
the more we are assailed by the sheer human perverseness,
the willfulness, of his attitude. If he is a friend, we can up
to a point deal with him as an object who does not function
well, but only up to a point; beyond that if a personal re¬
lation exists between us we have to deal with him as a
subject, and as such we must find him morally perverse or
willfully disagreeable; and we have to make these moral
judgments to his face if the friendship is to retain its human
content, and not disappear into a purely clinical relation.
At the center of the sickness of the psyche is a sickness of
the spirit. Contemporary psychoanalysis will have eventu¬
ally to reckon with this Kierkegaardian point of view;
among some schools there is already an uneasy edging in
its direction.

Kierkegaard’s insight is superior here because he is a “sub¬
jective thinker.” He thus plants himself within the subjec¬
tivity of the person, and his concern is with the “inward¬
ness” of the human being. But to see what this “inwardness”
means we have now to consider the problem of truth
itself.

4 . SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE
TRUTH

If the religious level of existence is understood as a stage
upon life’s way, then quite clearly the truth that religion is
concerned with is not at all the same as the objective truth
of a creed or belief. Religion is not a system of intellectual
propositions to which the believer assents because he knows
it to be true, as a system of geometry is true; existentially,
for the individual himself, religion means in the end simply
to be religious. In order to make clear what it means to be
religious, Kierkegaard had to reopen the whole question of
the meaning of truth. His was the first radical reappraisal
of the subject since the thirteenth century when St. Thomas
Aquinas’ monumental De Veritate had settled the mean¬
ing of truth for the next five centuries of philosophy; and

KEERKEGAAKD I7I

like that earlier treatment, Kierkegaard’s stand on the ques¬
tion may well have marked a turning point in European
philosophy.

Objective truth is easily recognized, and indeed today it
has come to be almost the only sense of the term in our
usage. If I know that twice two is four, this knowledge is in
the highest degree impersonal; once I know it, I know it,
and I need not struggle continuously to make it my own:
it is a reliable piece of lumber in the mental attic, one on
which I can put my hand any time I have need for it. But
the truth of religion is not at all like that: it is a truth that
must penetrate my own personal existence, or it is noth¬
ing; and I must struggle to renew it in my life every day.
What is in question here, says Kierkegaard, is one’s own
personal appropriation of the truth—“appropriation” com¬
ing from the Latin root proprius, meaning “one’s own.” A
learned theologian may be in possession of all the so-called
truths of rational theology, able to prove and disprove
propositions and generally hold his own dialectically with
the best; and yet in his heart God may have died or never
lived. On the other hand, an illiterate peasant who knows
nothing of formal theology, who may not even be able to
state accurately the tenets of his creed, nevertheless may
succeed in being religious. He is in the truth, as we say,
and people who know him can recognize this fact from his
presence, his bearing, his way of life. In the Oriental reli¬
gious and philosophical tradition, where truth has never
been defined as belonging basically to the intellect, the
Master is able to discern whether or not a disciple has at¬
tained enlightenment from how he behaves, what kind of
a person he has come to be, not from hearing him reason
about the Sutras. This kind of truth is not a truth of the
intellect but of the whole man. Strictly speaking, subjective
truth is not a truth that I have , but a truth that I am.

In the thirteenth century St. Thomas banished Augustin-
ianism or at least relegated it to a subsidiary place: truth
in the strictest sense, he said, is in the intellect, and specifi¬
cally in the intellect as it forms propositions that corre¬
spond with reality. Starting with this understanding of

172

IRRATIONAL MAN

truth, the centuries that followed were able to develop and
consolidate all that we now know as science. But what hap¬
pens if the question is now reopened, and if philosophers
go back for their answers to an older, prephilosophic un¬
derstanding of the meaning of truth? If we were to under¬
stand truth anew (and in this ancient sense), would not
our fundamental attitudes be so changed that our whole
civilization would become different? These are precisely
the questions that, as we shall see, lie at the center of Hei¬
degger’s philosophy. With Heidegger, philosophers have
only just begun to think about what lies implicit in the
Kierkegaardian distinction between subjective and objec¬
tive truth.

5- THE ATTACK UPON CHRISTENDOM

When we advance from the aesthetic to the religious
level of existence, Kierkegaard says, we become really seri¬
ous; we are not serious persons until we have become reli¬
gious. This seriousness has nothing to do with the solemnity
of the bourgeois or the official—that stuffed-shirtedness that
Sartre has sneered at in the “salauds"; it is the simple and
forthright seriousness of someone who has at last arrived
at his center, and who is therefore at last totally engaged
in the project of his life, with all that it entails. This person
exists under the eye of eternity, and therefore what he does
in the moment is absolutely real. It is quite fitting therefore
that the last act in Kierkegaard’s life should have been a
thoroughly existential one: an attack upon the Christianity
of his native Denmark, and by extension upon the public
and acknowledged Christianity of the whole modem world.
This polemic has been published in English as The Attack
upon Christendom, but a good part of it Kierkegaard pub¬
lished as a series of pamphlets under the title The Instant.
The title he gave these last writings, where thinking had in
fact become an existential deed, as powerful as a blow of
the fist, is significant, for it tells us that here the thinker
stands and wills to stand thoroughly and absolutely rooted
in his situation. Home is not only the place from which we

KIERKEGAARD

173

start, but that to which we must inevitably return. When
he had completed the last of the pamphlets, Kierkegaard
collapsed; he had literally burned himself out, and two
months later he was dead. He had done his work.

Before he published those pamphlets, however, Kierke¬
gaard had set forth in an earlier essay, The Present Age,
some criticisms of his time that were to prove brilliantly
prophetic; the essay has been the source of nearly all the
Existentialist criticisms of modem society—including those
by Jaspers, Ortega, Berdyaev, and Marcel. So well has
Kierkegaard’s prophecy held up in fact that even contem¬
porary efforts at journalistic sociology, like Riesman’s The
Lonely Crotcd or Whyte’s The Organization Man, are still
repeating and documenting his insights. The chief move¬
ment of modernity, Kierkegaard holds, is a drift toward
mass society, which means the death of the individual as
life becomes ever more collectivized and externalized. The
social thinking of the present age is determined, he says,
by what might be called the Law of Large Numbers: it
does not matter what quality each individual has, so long
as we have enough individuals to add up to a large number
—that is, to a crowd or mass. And where the mass is, there
is truth—so the modem world believes. Behind this social
observation, of course, lay Kierkegaard’s ultimate convic¬
tion that Christianity is something that concerns the indi¬
vidual alone; and this conviction, as the basis for his
criticism of modem times, was not fully developed until
his later polemic against contemporary Christendom. The
Present Age, brilliant as it is, is merely a tuning up for the
full orchestral blast of The Attack upon Christendom.

In the modem world it makes no sense and is in fact a
gigantic swindle to speak of Christian nations, Christian
states, or even Christian peoples: this is the sum and sub¬
stance of Kierkegaard’s attack. But his expression is so
direct and powerful, he rings so many momentous changes
upon this single theme, that The Attack upon Christendom
takes its place among the greatest polemics ever written.
The style itself is at the farthest remove from the fanciful
complexity of his earliest aesthetic writings; here the ex-

174

IRRATIONAL. MAN

pression is direct, vigorous, even coarse. Kierkegaard had
become serious, and with a vengeance. There can be no
doubt now that against the smug complacency of his time
that believed itself Christian and did not even know that it
was not, Kierkegaard was in the right, and his polemic
triumphs. But beyond the historical impact it had upon its
own time, The Attack upon Christendom broaches the
gravest questions about the possibility of religion becoming
altogether institutionalized, and thereby brings Kierke¬
gaard to his final statement of what it means to be Chris¬
tian. Here, it seems to me, he goes against his earlier
warning to himself that the Exception, the Single One or
extraordinary individual, though he has to follow the law
of his own being rather than that of the collective, cannot
expect everybody else to follow his way. Kierkegaard seems
to demand that the average person take up a Christianity
as strenuous as his own.

The problem of the institutionalizing of religion was
dealt with by another existentialist, Dostoevski, in his tre¬
mendous parable of the Grand Inquisitor, and the contrast
with Kierkegaard is singularly instructive. Intellectually, to
be sure, Dostoevski was on the side of Kierkegaard, and the
Grand Inquisitor he intended as a figure of evil, the totali¬
tarian master of men who gives them bread and peace and
relieves them from the anguish of being themselves. But
Dostoevski the novelist was caught up in the toils of a truth
different from that of Dostoevski the intellectual: as a
novelist he could not create a character without giving
himself to it, creating it from the inside out and thereby
giving the character its own truth. And as Dostoevski un¬
folds the parable (told through the mouth of Ivan Kara¬
mazov) there is no doubt that the Grand Inquisitor has his
truth, which Christ Himself, having returned to earth,
recognizes by bestowing a final kiss upon the Inquisitor’s
cheek. But the polemicist, in the necessity of driving a
point home, may lose sight of the novelist’s truth. Men are
sheep, says the Inquisitor, and need to be relieved of the
agony of selfhood. It will not do to say, as Kierkegaard does,
that he represents not a Christian severity as opposed to a

KIERKEGAARD

175

Christian leniency, but only a Christian honesty; for what
is more severe than honesty, and particularly an honesty
that would tell the sheep they can only live as sheep? Hu¬
mankind cannot bear very much reality, says T. S. Eliot;
and it is doubtful whether they can even bear the reality
of being told so. The Grand Inquisitor, the Pope of Popes,
relieves men of the burden of being Christian, but at the
same time leaves them the peace of believing they are
Christians.

Nietzsche, the passionate and religious atheist, insisted
on the necessity of a religious institution, the Church, to
keep the sheep in peace, thus putting himself at the op¬
posite extreme from Kierkegaard; Dostoevski in his story
of the Grand Inquisitor may be said to embrace dialecti¬
cally the two extremes of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. The
truth lies in the eternal tension between Christ and the
Grand Inquisitor. Without Christ the institution of religion
is empty and evil, but without the institution as a means
of mitigating it the agony in the desert of selfhood is not
viable for most men.

Nietzsche remarked that “the last Christian” died on the
Cross. In a somewhat different spirit we might apply the
term to Kierkegaard and say that he was the last Christian,
or at least the last Christian writer. This may seem para¬
doxical, in view of the fact that present-day Protestant the¬
ology practically lives off Kierkegaard’s capital. Theologi¬
ans like Karl Barth and Emil Brunner stand for a severe as
against a liberal Protestantism, and they follow Kierkegaard
in stressing the absolute paradox of Faith. But nowhere in
the work of these men do we hear the personal accent as
we do in Kierkegaard; neither of them raises the question
of Christianity, as did their predecessor, as something that
in the end concerns only himself, or interrogates himself as
to whether or not he can really hope to be a Christian at
all. The systematic theology of Paul Tillich could be em¬
braced by any naturalist who was not too obtuse psycho¬
logically and was interested in religion as a system of sym¬
bols. The theology of Rudolf Bultmann is not much more
than the philosophy of Heidegger touched with the emo-

176

IRRATIONAL MAN

tions of Christianity. The fact is that Kierkegaard stated the
question of Christianity so nakedly, made it turn so deci¬
sively about the individual and his quest for his own eternal
happiness, that all religious writers after him seem by com¬
parison to be symbolical, institutional, or metaphorical—in
a word, gnostic. Perhaps the very nakedness of Kierke¬
gaard’s statement of faith makes it impossible for Christian¬
ity now to go anywhere but in the direction of some kind
of gnosticism. The religious Existentialists of this century,
such as Berdyaev and Marcel, do not match Kierkegaard’s
passion or his passionate cleaving to the central issue any
more than the Protestant pastors do. The one exception to
this would be Miguel Unamuno, whose passion is worthy
of Kierkegaard and who in fact makes the whole question
of religion hinge on the individual’s desire for an eternal
happiness—that and nothing less. The question of death is
thus central to the whole of religious thought, is that to
which everything else in the religious striving is an acces¬
sory: “If there is no immortality, what use is God?” Una¬
muno quotes an old peasant, approvingly. The comparison
of these religious writers with Kierkegaard is not meant to
disparage the former; they are all subtle, powerful, and
profound, within their limits. It is meant rather to call at¬
tention to the fact that the quality of these writers’ Chris¬
tianity is historically different from Kierkegaard’s. They
happen also to be lesser men than Kierkegaard, and there¬
fore perhaps any comparison is unfair. At any rate, it is
fitting that the simplest and most profound tribute to Kier¬
kegaard should have come from the pen of Unamuno: “Y
que hembre !’’—“And what a man!”

If he had been carving the epitaph for his own tomb¬
stone, Kierkegaard said, he would have chosen nothing
more than the simple phrase: The Individual. We do not
yet know, but history may already have dug a grave for
that individual for whom he was nearly the last to speak.

NIETZSCHE

Chapter Eight

By the middle of the nineteenth century, as we have
seen, the problem of man had begun to dawn on certain
minds in a new and more radical form: Man, it was seen,
is a stranger to himself and must discover, or rediscover,
who he is and what his meaning is. Kierkegaard had rec¬
ommended a rediscovery of the religious center of the Self,
which for European man had to mean a return to Chris¬
tianity, but what he had in mind was a radical return that
went back beyond organized Christendom and its churches
to a state of contemporaneity with the first disciples of
Christ. Nietzsche’s solution harked back to an even more
remote and archaic past: to the early Greeks, before either
Christianity or science had put its blight upon the healthi¬
ness of man’s instincts.

It was Nietzsche’s fate to experience the problem of man
in a peculiarly personal and virulent form. At twenty-four,
an unheard-of age in the German academic world, he be¬
came Professor of Classical Philology at the University of
Basel. The letter of recommendation written for him on this
occasion by his teacher, Ritschl, is almost one continuous
exclamation of awe at the prodigy of culture being sent to
Basel. Besides being immensely learned in the classical lan¬
guages, Nietzsche showed extraordinary literary promise
and was also a gifted musician. But this prodigy was also
a very delicate and sickly youth, with weak eyesight and a
nervous stomach. Nietzsche had undoubtedly inherited this
fragile constitution, but in later years he tended to think

i/8

IRRATIONAL MAN

resentfully that it had been brought about by the excessive
labors of scholarship. At any rate, intensive study had not
helped his health. He thus knew at first hand the war be¬
tween culture and vitality: he was himself, in fact, the field
of battle between the two. He had to resign his professor¬
ship after ten years because of his poor health. Thereafter
he became the wanderer and his shadow—to use the title
of one of his books, which accurately describes his own life
—traveling all over southern Europe in search of a health
that he never could regain. In those disconsolate and lonely
years all his glittering cultural attributes did not help him
in the least; culture, in fact, was a screen between the wan¬
derer and the natural man that he strove to resurrect. As a
scholarly bookworm he had not even known that he was
unknown to himself, but when his eyesight became too poor
to read books he began at last to read himself: a text that
culture up to that time had obscured.

Nietzsche had originally encountered the god Dionysus
in his studies of Greek tragedy. Dionysus was the patron
deity of the Greek tragic festivals, and so the cult of this
god had received all the blessing of high culture, since it
was associated with the most sublime and formally beau¬
tiful products of human art. On the other hand, the Dio¬
nysian cult reached back into the most primitive and ar¬
chaic eras of the Greek race. For Dionysus was the god of
the vine, the god of drunken ecstasy and frenzy, who made
the vine come to life in spring and brought all men together
in the joy of intoxication. This god thus united miraculously
in himself the height of culture with the depth of instinct,
bringing together the warring opposites that divided Nietz¬
sche himself. The problem of reconciling these opposites
was the central theme later of D. H. Lawrence, of Gide in
his Immoralist (a fiction based upon Nietzsche’s life), and
of Freud in one of his last and most significant works, Civili¬
zation and Its Discontents. It is still the most formidable
problem of man in our twentieth, the psychoanalytic, cen¬
tury. Dionysus reborn, Nietzsche thought, might become a
savior-god for the whole race, which seemed everywhere
to show symptoms of fatigue and decline. The symbol of

NIETZSCHE

179

the god became so potent for Nietzsche that it ended—as
only symbols can do—by taking possession of his life. He
consecrated himself to the service of the god Dionysus.

But Dionysus is a dangerous as well as an ambiguous
god. Those in antiquity who meddled with him ended by
being tom to pieces. When he took possession of his own
followers he drove them to frenzies of destruction. He was
called, among other names, “the homed one” and “the bull”
by the Greeks, and in one of his cults was worshiped in
the form of a bull who was ritually slaughtered and tom
to pieces. So Dionysus himself, according to the myth, had
been tom to pieces by the Titans, those formless powers
of the subterranean world who were always at war with
the enlightened gods of Olympus. The fate of his god over¬
took Nietzsche: he too was tom apart by the dark forces
of the underworld, succumbing, at the age of forty-five, to
psychosis. It may be a metaphor, but it is certainly not an
exaggeration, to say that he perished as a ritual victim
slaughtered for the sake of his god.

It is equally tme, and perhaps just another way of saying
the same thing, that Nietzsche perished for the sake of the
problems of life that he set out to solve. The sacrifice of a
victim, in the ancient and primitive world, was supposed to
bring blessings upon the rest of the tribe, but Nietzsche
was one of those who bring not peace but a sword. His
works have divided, shocked, and perplexed readers ever
since his death, and at the low point of his posthumous
fortune his name was polluted by a Nietzschean cult among
the Nazis. Nevertheless, the victim did not perish in vain;
his sacrifice can be an immense lesson to the rest of the
tribe if it is willing to leam from him. Nietzsche’s fate is
one of the great episodes in man’s historic effort to know
himself. After him, the problem of man could never quite
return to its pre-Nietzschean level. Nietzsche it was who
showed in its fullest sense how thoroughly problematical is
the nature of man: he can never be understood as an animal
species within the zoological order of nature, because he
has broken free of nature and has thereby posed the ques¬
tion of his own meaning—and with it the meaning of nature

i8o

IRRATIONAL MAN

as well—as his destiny. Nietzsche’s works are an immense
mine of observations on the condition of man, one that we
are still in the process of quarrying.

Moreover, Nietzsche’s life stands in a double sense as a
great warning to mankind, to be heeded lest we too suffer
the fate of being tom apart like Dionysus Zagreus. He who
would make the descent into the lower regions runs the risk
of succumbing to what the primitives call “the perils of the
soul”—the unknown Titans that lie within, below the sur¬
face of our selves. To ascend again from the darkness of
Avemus is, as the Latin poet tells us, the difficult thing,
and he who would make the descent had better secure his
lines of communication with the surface. Communication
means community, and the adventurer into the depths
would do well to have roots in a human community and
perhaps even the ballast, somewhere in his nature, of a little
bit of Philistinism. Nietzsche lacked such lines of communi¬
cation, for he had cut himself off from the human com¬
munity; he was one of the loneliest men that ever existed.
By comparison, Kierkegaard looks almost like a worldly
soul, for he was at least solidly planted in his native
Copenhagen, and though he may have been at odds with
his fellow citizens, he loved the town, and it was his home.
Nietzsche, however, was altogether and utterly homeless.
He who descends must keep in touch with the surface, but
on the other hand—and this is the other sense of Nietzsche’s
warning—modern man may also be tom apart by the titanic
forces within himself if he does not attempt the descent into
Avemus. It is no mere matter of psychological curiosity but
a question of life and death for man in our time to place
himself again in contact with the archaic life of his uncon¬
scious. Without such contact he may become the Titan who
slays himself. Man, this most dangerous of the animals, as
Nietzsche called him, now holds in his hands the dangerous
power of blowing himself and his planet to bits; and it is
not yet even clear that this problematic and complex being
is really sane.

NIETZSCHE 181

1. ECCE HOMO

“In the end one experiences only oneself,” Nietzsche ob¬
serves in his Zarathustra, and elsewhere he remarks, in the
same vein, that all the systems of the philosophers are just
so many forms of personal confession, if we but had eyes
to see it. Following this conviction, that the thinker cannot
be separated from his thought, Nietzsche revealed himself
in his work more fully than any philosopher before or since.
Hence the best introduction to him may be the little auto¬
biographical book Ecce Homo, which is his own attempt to
take stock of himself and his life. Nietzsche is not the most
prepossessing figure, as we are introduced to him here, for
in this work he was clearly already in the grip of the psy¬
chological malady that three years later was to bring on his
breakdown. But he is a great enough figure that he can
stand being approached from his weakest side. And did not
he himself say we must divest philosophers of their masks,
learn to see the thinker’s shadow in his thought? Paradoxi¬
cal as it may sound, to praise Nietzsche properly we have
also to say the worst possible things about him. This too is
in line with his own principle, that good and bad in any
individual are inextricably one, all the more so as the op¬
posing qualities become more extreme. All of Nietzsche—
in his extremes of good and bad—is summed up in Ecce
Homo, and it is precisely the all that he himself could not
see.

An unprejudiced psychological observer is at once fasci¬
nated and appalled by what he finds in Ecce Homo. The
process of ego-inflation has already gone beyond the bounds
of what we ordinarily call neurosis. And this inflation is al¬
ready tinged with curious distortions of the facts: Nietz¬
sche refers to himself swaggeringly as “an old artilleryman”
as if he had had a robust military career, though we of
course know that his service in the artillery was so brief
as to be almost non-existent, and that it terminated with
his illness after a fall from his horse. The relation with Lou
Salome, which was in fact very slight, is described obliquely
in such a fashion as to suggest that Nietzsche was a devil

II

IRRATIONAL MAN

l82

of a fellow with women. These are not the shallow lies of a
calculating mind, but delusions in the systematic sense of
psychopathology: that is, fantasies in which the man him¬
self has begun to live. He rails against the Germans, yet he
himself is German to the marrow. And while he proclaims
himself above all resentments, we are aware throughout of
a thin skin that is smarting with resentment at his lack of
readers and of recognition in Germany. Nietzsche speaks of
himself as the greatest psychologist who ever lived; and
while there is some basis for so grandiose a boast—he was
indeed a great psychologist—the overwhelming question his
book raises is why this psychologist has so little insight into
himself. The vision of his true self, we suspect, would have
been too terrifying for him to face. The fantasies, the de¬
lusions, the grandiose inflation of the ego are only devices
to shield him from the sight of the other side of himself
—of Nietzsche the sickly lonely man, emotionally starved,
a ghost flitting from place to place, always without a home
—the dwarf side, that is, of the giant about whom he boasts.
Nietzsche’s systematic shielding of himself from the other
side is relevant to his explanation of the death of God: Man
killed God, he says, because he could not bear to have any¬
one looking at his ugliest side. Man must cease to feel guilt,
he goes on; and yet one senses an enormous hidden guilt
and feeling of inferiority behind his own frantic boasts. Yet,
though the wind of madness may already be blowing
through Ecce Homo, at the same time the powers of Nietz¬
sche’s mind were never more formidable. The style is as
brisk and incisive as anything he wrote, as he lays before
us in bold and simple outline the guiding pattern of his
ideas. It is this split between madness and coherence that
makes the book so paradoxical. How could the mind of this
man have so split off from the rest of himself—and this in a
thinker who, above all other philosophers, seemed to have
found access to the unconscious?

The title of the book itself Ecce Homo —“Behold the
Man!”, the words of Pontius Pilate spoken about Christ—
supplies a very definite clue. The imitation of Christ, in
however remote and unconscious a form, is something that

NIETZSCHE

183

almost nobody raised a Christian can avoid. (“All my life
I have compared myself with Christ,” exclaims the tramp
in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.) Nietzsche had
come from a line of Protestant pastors, had been raised in
a very pious atmosphere, and was himself as a boy very
devout. The religious influences of childhood are the hard¬
est things to extirpate; the leopard can as easily change his
spots. Had Nietzsche merely lost his Christian faith, or even
simply attacked it intellectually, these acts would in them¬
selves have been sufficient to create a conflict within him;
but he went further by attempting to deny the Christian
in himself, and thereby split himself in two. The symbol of
Dionysus had possessed him intellectually; he identified
with this pagan god (in one place in Ecce Homo he ac¬
tually speaks of himself as Dionysus), and thenceforth,
with all the energy of mind that he could summon, he de¬
voted himself to elaborating the opposition between Dio¬
nysus and Christ. In the end, however, the symbol of Christ
proved the more potent; and when his unconscious finally
broke irremediably into the open, it was Christ who took
possession of Nietzsche, as is shown by the letters written
after his breakdown which he signed “The Crucified One.”

In a life so filled with portents and omens it is remarkable
that he should have recorded one—in a dream he had when
a schoolboy of fifteen, at Pforta—that was prophetic of the
central conflict out of which he was to write and five. In
the dream he was wandering about in a gloomy wood at
night, and after being terrified by “a piercing shriek from
a neighboring lunatic asylum,” he met with a hunter whose
“features were wild and uncanny.” In a valley “surrounded
by dense undergrowth,” the hunter raised his whistle to his
lips and blew such “a shrill note” that Nietzsche woke out
of his nightmare. Now it is interesting that in this dream
he had been on his way to Eisleben, Luther’s town; but
on meeting the hunter it became a question of going in¬
stead to Teutschenthal (which means, German Valley).
That is, the two roads diverge, one leading toward Lu¬
theran Christianity, the other toward the primeval pagan
German soil. Being a classical scholar, Nietzsche preferred

184

DURATIONAL MAN

to let his wandering German god assume the Greek guise of
Dionysus. It would be farfetched to make much of this
dream if it were merely an isolated revelation, but it is in
fact of a piece with the other dreams and visions that
Nietzsche poured into his writings. Even the frightening
prophecy of madness that occurs in the dream is echoed
among the images of Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s life has all
the characteristics of a psychological fatality.

Now all these self-revelations that we have been discuss¬
ing, it might be said, reflect nothing but a pathological
process, and therefore had best be left to one side while we
discuss the philosophic ideas of this thinker. Unfortunately,
nothing in life is nothing but; it is always something more.
What we have been talking about is indeed a pathological
process, but it is also a pathological process taking place
in a thinker of genius, from whom the process thereby ac¬
quires an immense significance. It is just as much a mistake
for interpreters of Nietzsche to cast aside this whole matter
of Nietzsche’s sickness, as it was for the Philistines, shocked
by his ideas, to discount them simply as the ravings of a
madman. It may be that genius and neurosis are inextri¬
cably linked, as some recent discussions of the subject have
held; in any case Nietzsche would be one of the prime ex¬
amples of the kind of truth neurosis, and even worse than
neurosis, can be made to reveal for the rest of mankind. The
pathological process in Nietzsche, which we have dealt
with only briefly here, is in fact indispensable for an under¬
standing of the philosophic meaning of atheism as he tried
to live it. Nietzsche was engaged in a process of tearing
himself loose from his psychological roots at the very mo¬
ment in history that Western man was doing likewise—only
the latter did not know it. Up to that time man had lived
in the childhood shelter of his gods or of God; now that all
the gods were dead he was taking his first step into ma¬
turity. This, for Nietzsche, was the most momentous event
in modem history, one to which all the social, economic,
and military upheavals of the nineteenth and indeed of the
coming twentieth century would, as he prophesied, be sec¬
ondary. Could mankind meet this awful challenge of be-

NIETZSCHE

185

coming adult and godless? Yes, said Nietzsche, because
man is the most courageous animal and will be able to sur¬
vive even the death of his gods. The very process of tearing
consciousness loose from its roots, which ends inevitably in
Ecce Homo in the grandiose inflation of the ego, had for
Nietzsche himself the significance of a supreme act of cour¬
age. Not a day goes by, he wrote in one of his letters, that
I do not lop off some comforting belief. Man must live with¬
out any religious or metaphysical consolations. And if it was
to be humanity’s fate to become godless, he, Nietzsche,
elected to be the prophet who would give the necessary
example of courage. It is in this light that we must look
upon Nietzsche as a culture hero: he chose, that is, to suffer
the conflict within his culture in its most acute form and
was ultimately tom apart by it.

Now, there are atheists and atheists. The urbane atheism
of Bertrand Russell, for example, presupposes the existence
of believers against whom he can score points in an argu¬
ment and get off some of his best quips. The atheism of
Sartre is a more somber affair, and indeed borrows some of
its color from Nietzsche: Sartre relentlessly works out the
atheistic conclusion that in a universe without God man is
absurd, unjustified, and without reason, as Being itself is.
Still, this kind of atheism seems to carry with it the bravado
of one who is ranging himself on the side of a less sanguine
truth than the rest of mankind. Nietzsche’s atheism, how¬
ever, goes even deeper. He projects himself into the situa¬
tion where God is really dead for the whole of mankind,
and he shares in the common fate, not merely scoring points
off the believers. Section 125 of The Joyful Wisdom, the
passage in which Nietzsche first speaks of the death of God,
is one of the most heart-rending things he ever wrote. The
man who has seen the death of God, significantly enough,
is a madman, and he cries out his vision to the unheeding
populace in the market place, asking the question: “Do we
not now wander through an endless Nothingness?” Here we
are no longer dealing with the abstractions of logical argu¬
ment, but with a fate that has overtaken mankind. Of
course, Nietzsche himself tried elsewhere to assume the

i86

IB RATIONAL MAN

witty mask of the libre penseur of the Enlightenment and
to make brilliant aphorisms about God’s non-existence. And
in his Zarathustra he speaks of “Zarathustra the godless”
and even “the most godless.” But godless is one thing Nietz¬
sche certainly was not: he was in the truest sense possessed
by a god, though he could not identify what god it was
and mistakenly took him for Dionysus. In a very early
poem, “To the Unknown God,” written when he was only
twenty years old, he speaks about himself as a god-
possessed man, more truthfully than he was later, as a phi¬
losopher, to be able to recognize:

I must know thee, Unknown One,

Thou who searchest out the depths of my soul,

And blowest like a storm through my life.

Thou art inconceivable and yet my kinsman!

I must know thee and even serve thee.

Had God really died in the depths of Nietzsche’s soul or
was it merely that the intellect of the philosopher could not
cope with His presence and His meaning?

If God is taken as a metaphysical object whose existence
has to be proved, then the position held by scientifically-
minded philosophers like Russell must inevitably be valid:
the existence of such an object can never be empirically
proved. Therefore, God must be a superstition held by
primitive and childish minds. But both these alternative
views are abstract, whereas the reality of God is concrete,
a thoroughly autonomous presence that takes hold of men
but of which, of course, some men are more conscious than
others. Nietzsche’s atheism reveals the true meaning of God
—and does so, we might add, more effectively than a good
many official forms of theism. He himself scoffs in one place
at his being confused with the ordinary run of freethinkers,
who have not the least understanding of his atheism. And
despite the desperate struggle of the “godless Zarathustra,”
Nietzsche remained in the possession of this Unknown God
to whom he had paid homage in his youth. This possession
is shown in its most violent form in Zarathustra (IV, 65),
even though Nietzsche puts the words into the mouth of

NIETZSCHE 187

the Magician, an aspect of himself that he wishes to
exorcise:

Thus do I lie,

Bend myself, twist myself, convulsed
With all eternal torture.

And smitten

By thee, cruelest huntsman.

Thou unfamiliar—GOD

At this point we are ready to see what takes place behind
the scenes in Zarathustra, where all the aforementioned
themes become fully orchestrated.

2. WHAT HAPPENS IN
“zarathustra”; NIETZSCHE AS
MORAL 1ST

No adequate psychological commentary on Thus Spake
Zarathustra has yet been written, perhaps because the ma¬
terials in it are so inexhaustible. It is a unique work of self¬
revelation but not at all on the personal or autobiographical
level, and Nietzsche himself ostensibly does not appear in
it; it is self-revelation at a greater, more primordial depth,
where the stream of the unconscious itself gushes forth from
the rock. Perhaps no other book contains such a steady
procession of images, symbols, and visions straight out of
the unconscious. It was Nietzsche’s poetic work and be¬
cause of this he could allow the unconscious to take over
in it, to break through the restraints imposed elsewhere by
the philosophic intellect. For this reason it is important be¬
yond any of his strictly philosophic books; its content is
actually richer than Nietzsche’s own conceptual thought,
and its symbols of greater wisdom and significance than he
himself was able to grasp.

Nietzsche himself has described the process of inspira¬
tion by which he wrote this book, and his description makes
it clear beyond question that we are in the presence here

i88

IRBATIONAL MAN

of an extraordinary release of and invasion by the un¬
conscious:

Can any one at the end of this nineteenth century have
any distinct notion of what poets of a more vigorous pe¬
riod meant by inspiration? If not, I should like to describe
it. . . . The notion of revelation describes the condition
quite simply; by which I mean that something pro¬
foundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes vis¬
ible and audible with indescribable definiteness and
exactness. . . . There is an ecstasy whose terrific tension
is sometimes released by a flood of tears, during which
one’s progress varies from involuntary impetuosity to in¬
voluntary slowness. There is the feeling that one is utterly
out of hand. . . . Everything occurs quite without voli¬
tion, as if in an eruption of freedom, independence,
power and divinity. The spontaneity of the images and
similes is most remarkable; one loses all perception of
what is imagery and simile; everything offers itself as the
most immediate, exact, and simple means of expression.

“One loses all perception of what is imagery and simile”
—that is to say, the symbol itself supersedes thought, be¬
cause it is richer in meaning.

His most lyrical book, Zarathustra is also the expression
of the loneliest Nietzsche. It has about it the icy and arid
atmosphere not merely of the symbolic mountaintop on
which Zarathustra dwells, but of a real one. Reading it, one
sometimes feels almost as if one were watching a film of
the ascent of Mount Everest, hearing the climber’s sobbing
gasp for breath as he struggles slowly to higher and still
higher altitudes. Climbing a mountain is the aptest meta¬
phor for getting above ordinary humanity, and this pre¬
cisely is what Zarathustra-Nietzsche is struggling to do. One
hears throughout the book, though, in the gasping breath
of the climber, the lament of Nietzsche the man.

The book begins with the recognition of this human
relevance as Zarathustra, about to leave his mountain soli¬
tude, declares he is going down among men “once again
to be a man.” The mountain is the solitude of the spirit,

NIETZSCHE

189

the lowlands represent the world of ordinary men. The
same symbolic contrast appears in Zarathustra’s pet ani¬
mals, the eagle and the serpent: the one the creature of
the upper air, the other the one that moves closest to the
earth. Zarathustra, as the third element, symbolizes the
union between the two animals, of high and low, heaven
and earth. He is going down among men, he says, as the
sun sets dipping into the darkness below the horizon. But
the sun sets in order to be reborn the next morning as a
young and glowing god. The book thus opens with the sym¬
bols of rebirth and resurrection, and this is in fact the real
theme of Zarathustra: how is man to be reborn, like the
phoenix, from his own ashes? How is he to become really
healthy and whole? Behind this question we see the per¬
sonal shadow of Nietzsche’s own illness and his long strug¬
gle to regain health; Zarathustra is at once the idealized
image of himself and the symbol of a victory, in the strug¬
gle for health and wholeness, that Nietzsche himself was
not able to achieve in life.

Despite the intensely personal sources of his theme,
Nietzsche was dealing in this work with a problem that had
already become central in German culture. Schiller and
Goethe had dealt with it—Schiller as early as 1795 in his
remarkable Letters on Aesthetic Education, and Goethe in
his Faust. Schiller has given an extraordinarily clear state¬
ment of the problem, which was for him identical in all
its salient features with the problem later posed by Nietz¬
sche. For man, says Schiller, the problem is one of forming
individuals. Modem life has departmentalized, specialized,
and thereby fragmented the being of man. We now face
the problem of putting the fragments together into a whole.
In the course of his exposition, Schiller even referred back,
as did Nietzsche, to the example of the Greeks, who pro¬
duced real individuals and not mere learned abstract men
like those of the modem age. Goethe was even closer to
Nietzsche; Faust and Zarathustra are in fact brothers
among books. Both attempt to elaborate in symbols the
process by which the superior individual—whole, intact,
and healthy—is to be formed; and both are identically “im-

190 IRRATIONAL MAN

moral” in their content, if morality is measured in its usual
conventional terms.

Placed within the German cultural context, indeed,
Nietzsche’s immoralism begins to look less extreme than the
popular imagination has taken it to be; it is not even as
extreme as he was led to make it appear in some of the
bloody creations of his overheated imagination in his last
work, The Will to Power. Goethe in Faust was every bit
as much at odds with conventional morality as was Nietz¬
sche, but the old diplomatic fox of Weimar was a more
tactful and better-balanced man and knew how to get his
point across quietly, without shrieking it from the house¬
tops as Nietzsche did. The Faust of the second part of
Goethe’s poem is already, as we have seen, something of a
Nietzschean Superman, beyond ordinary good and evil,
The story of the other, moral Faust is told in the popular
sentimental opera of Gounod, in which the character sells
himself to the Devil and wrongs a young girl; the whole
thing comes to an end with the girl’s tragic death. But
Goethe could not leave matters at this; the problem that
had taken hold of him, through his creation of Faust, led
him to look upon Gretchen’s tragedy simply as a stage along
Faust’s way. A process of self-development such as his
cannot come to a close because a young girl whom he has
seduced goes crazy and dies. The strong man survives such
disasters and becomes harder. The Devil, with whom Faust
has made a pact, becomes in a real sense his servitor and
subordinate, just as our devil, if joined to ourselves, may
become a fruitful and positive force; like Blake before him
Goethe knew full well the ambiguous power contained in
the traditional symbol of the Devil. Nietzsche’s immoralism,
though stated much more violently, consisted in not much
more than the elaboration of Goethe’s point: Man must in¬
corporate his devil or, as he put it, man must become better
and more evil; the tree that would grow taller must send its
roots down deeper.

If Nietzsche was not able to contain himself as tactfully
as Goethe, on this point, he nevertheless had something to
shriek about: The whole of traditional morality, he be-

NIETZSCHE

191

lieved, had no grasp of psychological reality and was there¬
fore dangerously one-sided and false. To be sure, this had
always been known but mankind, spouting ideals, had
looked at such realities and winked, or adopted casuistry.
But if one is going to live one’s life literally and totally by
the Sermon on the Mount or Buddha’s Dhammapada, and
one cannot manage to be a saint, one will end by making
a sorry mess of oneself. Nietzsche’s point has already car¬
ried so far that today in our ordinary valuations we are
actually living in a post-Nietzschean world, one in which
the psychoanalyst sometimes finds it necessary to tell a pa¬
tient that he ought to be more aggressive and more selfish.
Besides, what does the whole history of ethics amount to
for that half, and more than half, of the human race,
women, who deal with moral issues in altogether different
terms from men? It amounts to rather a silly man-made
affair that has very little to do with the real business of
life. On this point Nietzsche has a perfectly sober and
straightforward case against all those idealists, from Plato
onward, who have set universal ideas over and above the
individual’s psychological needs. Morality itself is blind to
the tangle of its own psychological motives, as Nietzsche
showed in one of his most powerful books. The Genealogy
of Morals, which traces the source of morality back to the
drives of power and resentment. There are other motives
that Nietzsche did not see, or did not care to honor, but no
one can deny that these two, power and resentment, have
historically been part of the shadow behind the moralist’s
severity.

But it is precisely here, in the context of the Faust-
Zarathustra parallel, that the chief problem arises for Nietz¬
sche as man and moralist. Suppose the ethical problem be¬
comes the problem of the individual; the ethical question
then becomes: How is the individual to nourish himself in
order to grow? Once we set ourselves to reclaim that por¬
tion of human nature that traditional morality rejected-
man’s devil, to put it symbolically—we face the immense
problem of socializing and taming those impulses. Here the
imagination of Faustian man tends to become much too

192

IRRATIONAL MAN

highfalutin. For Western man Faust has become the great
symbol of the titanically striving individual, so much so that
the historian Spengler could use the term “Faustian culture”
to denote the whole modem epoch of our dynamic conquest
of nature. In Nietzsche’s Superman the spiritual tension
would be even greater, for such an individual would be
living at a higher level than all of humanity in the past.
But what about the individual devil within the Superman?
What about Zarathustra’s devil? So far as Nietzsche at¬
tempts to make the goal of this higher individual the goal
of mankind, a fatal ambiguity appears within his ideal it¬
self. Is the Superman to be the extraordinary man, or the
complete and whole man? Psychological wholeness does
not necessarily coincide with extraordinary powers, and the
great genius may be a crippled and maimed figure, as was
Nietzsche himself. In our own day, of course, when men
tend more and more to be miserable human fragments,
the complete man, if such existed, would probably stand
out from the others like a sore thumb, but he might not at
all be a creature of genius or extraordinary powers. Will
the Superman, then, be the titanically striving individual,
dwelling on the mountaintop of the spirit, or will he be the
man who has realized within the world his own individual
capacities for wholeness? The two ideals are in contradic¬
tion—a contradiction that is unresolved in Nietzsche and
within modem culture itself.

The fact is that Zarathustra-Nietzsche did not come to
terms with his own devil, and this is the crucial failure of
Zarathustra in the book and of Nietzsche in his life. Con¬
sequently, it is also the failure of Nietzsche as a thinker.
Not that Zarathustra-Nietzsche does not see his devil; time
and again the latter pokes a warning finger at Zarathustra,
and like a good devil he knows how to assume many shapes
and disguises. He is the clown who leaps over the rope-
dancer’s head at the beginning of the book, he is the Ugliest
Man, who has killed God, and he is the Spirit of Gravity,
whom Zarathustra himself names as his devil—the spirit of
heaviness which would pull his too high-soaring spirit to
earth. Each time Zarathustra thrusts aside the warning

NIETZSCHE

193

finger, finding it merely a reason for climbing a higher
mountain to get away from it. The most crucial revela¬
tion, however, comes in the chapter “The Vision and the
Enigma” (III, 46), in which the warning figure becomes
a dwarf sitting on Zarathustra’s back as the latter climbs
a lonely mountain path. Zarathustra wants to climb up¬
ward, but the dwarf wants to pull him back to earth. “O
Zarathustra,” the dwarf whispers to him, “thou didst throw
thyself high, but every stone that is thrown must fall.” And
then, in a prophecy the more menacing when applied to
Nietzsche himself: “O Zarathustra, far indeed didst thou
throw thy stone, but upon thyself will it recoil!” This is the
ancient pattern of the Greek myths: the hero who soars too
high crashes to earth; and Nietzsche, as a scholar of Greek
tragedy, should have given more respectful ear to the
dwarfs warning.

But why a dwarf? The egotism of Zarathustra-Nietzsche
rates himself too high; therefore the figure in the vision, to
right the balance, shows him to himself as a dwarf.
The dwarf is the image of mediocrity that lurks within
Zarathustra-Nietzsche, and that mediocrity was the most
frightening and distasteful thing that Nietzsche was willing
to see in himself. Nietzsche had discovered the shadow, the
underside, of human nature, and he had correctly seen it
as a side that is present inescapably in every human in¬
dividual. But he converted this perception into a kind of
romantic diabolism; it amused him to play at being wicked
and daring. He would have been prepared to meet his own
devil if this devil had appeared in some grandiose form.
Precisely what is hardest for us to take is the devil as the
personification of the pettiest, paltriest, meanest part of our
personality. Dostoevski understood this better than Nietz¬
sche, and in that tremendous chapter of The Brothers
Karamazov where the Devil appears to Ivan, the brilliant
literary intellectual nourished on the Romanticism of Schil¬
ler, it is not in the guise of a dazzling Miltonic Lucifer or
a swaggering operatic Mephistopheles, but rather of a
faded, shabby-genteel person, a little out of fashion and ri¬
diculous in his aestheticism—the perfect caricature of Ivan’s

194

IRRATIONAL MAN

own aesthetic mind. This figure is the Devil for Ivan
Karamazov, the one that most cruelly deflates his egotism;
and Dostoevski’s genius as a psychologist perhaps never hit
the nail on the head more accurately than in this passage.
Nietzsche himself said of Dostoevski that he was the only
psychologist from whom he had had anything to leam; the
remark is terribly true, and in a profounder sense than
Nietzsche realized.

Zarathustra—to return to him—is too touchy to acknowl¬
edge himself as this dwarf. He feels his courage challenged
and believes it will be the supreme act of courage, the high¬
est virtue, to get rid of the dwarf. “Courage at last bade me
stand still and say: Dwarf! Either thou or I!” It would have
been wiser, and even more courageous, to admit who the
dwarf really was and to say, not “Either thou or I” but
rather, “Thou and I (ego) are one self.”

The vision shifts and pauses for a moment, and Nietzsche
now presents us with the idea of the Eternal Return. This
idea has an ambiguous status in Nietzsche. He tried to base
it rationally and scientifically on the premise that if time
were infinite and the particles in the universe finite, then
by the laws of probability all combinations must repeat
themselves over and over again eternally; and that there¬
fore everything, we ourselves included, must recur again
and again down to the last detail. But to take this as a purely
intellectual hypothesis does not explain why the idea of the
Eternal Return had such a powerful hold upon Nietzsche’s
emotions, and why, particularly, the idea is revealed at this
most charged and visionary moment in Zarathustra. The
circle is a pure archetypal form for the eternal: “I saw
Eternity the other night,” says the English poet Vaughan,
“Like a great ring of pure and endless light.” The idea of
the Eternal Return thus expresses, as Unamuno has pointed
out, Nietzsche’s own aspirations toward eternal and immor¬
tal life. On the other hand, the notion is a frightening one
for a thinker who sees the whole meaning of mankind to
lie in the future, in the Superman that man is to become;
for if all tilings repeat themselves in an endless cycle, and
if man must come again in the paltry and botched form

NIETZSCHE

195

in which he now exists—then what meaning can man have?
For Nietzsche the idea of the Eternal Return becomes the
supreme test of courage: If Nietzsche the man must return
to life again and again, with the same burden of ill health
and suffering, would it not require the greatest affirmation
and love of life to say Yes to this absolutely hopeless
prospect?

Zarathustra glimpses some of the fearful implications in
this vision, for he remarks after expounding the Eternal Re¬
turn, “So I spoke, and always more softly: for I was afraid
of my own thoughts, and afterthoughts.” Thereupon, in the
dream, he hears a dog howl and sees a shepherd writhing
on the ground, with a heavy black reptile hanging from his
mouth. “Bite!” cries Zarathustra, and the shepherd bites the
serpent’s head off and spits it far away. The uncanny vision
poses its enigma to Zarathustra:

Ye daring onesl Ye venturers and adventurers, and
whoever of you have embarked with cunning sails on un¬
explored seas! Ye enjoyers of enigmas!

Solve unto me the enigma that I then beheld, interpret
for me the vision of the loneliest one.

For it was a vision and a foresight. What did I then
behold in parable? And who is it that must come some
day?

Who is the shepherd into whose throat the serpent
thus crawled? Who is the man into whose throat all the
heaviest and blackest will crawl?

—The shepherd bit as my cry had admonished him;
he took a good bite, and spit the head of the serpent far
away:—and sprang up—

No longer shepherd, no longer man—a transfigured be¬
ing, a light-surrounded being, that laughed. Never on
earth laughed a man as he laughed!

O my brethren, I heard a laughter which was no hu¬
man laughter.

“Who is the shepherd into whose throat the serpent thus
crawled?” He is Nietzsche himself, and both the serpent

IRRATIONAL MAN

196

and the dwarf set for him the same task: to acknowledge
“the heaviest and the blackest in himself.” We commonly
speak of the truth as a bitter pill that we have to swallow,
but the truth about ourselves may take even the more re¬
pulsive form of a reptile. Nietzsche does not swallow the
serpent’s head; he denies his own shadow, and out of it he
sees a transfigured being spring up. This being laughs with
a laughter that is no longer human. We know this laughter
all too well: it is the laughter of insanity. A few years ago
Andre Breton, the surrealist, published an Anthologie de
Vhumeur noir, in which was included one of Nietzsche’s let¬
ters written after his psychosis. If one did not know who
the author was and what his condition was when he wrote
it, one could indeed take the letter as a dazzling piece of
surrealistic laughter, a high empty mad laughter. This is
the laughter Nietzsche hears in his vision, and he speaks
like a tragic character ironically ignorant of his own proph¬
ecy when he says, “It was a vision and a prevision.” This
laughter already began to sound eerily in the pages of
Ecce Homo.

There is an inner coherence in the vision of Zarathustra,
in that each of its three parts—the dwarf, the Eternal Re¬
turn, and the shepherd spitting out the serpent—presents an
obstacle and objection to Nietzsche’s utopian conception of
the Superman. They prefigure his own personal catastro¬
phe; but since he was a thinker who really lived his
thought, they indicate the fatal flaw in all such utopian
thought. He who would launch the Superman into inter¬
stellar space had better recognize that the dwarf goes with
him. “Human, all too human!” Nietzsche exclaimed in dis¬
gust at mankind as it had hitherto existed. But he who
would try to improve man might do well not to make him
inhuman but, rather, a little more human. To be a whole
man—a round man, as the Chinese say—Western man may
have to learn to be less Faustian. A touch of the average,
the mediocre, may be necessary ballast for human nature.
The antidote to the hysterical, mad laughter of Zarathus-
tra’s vision may be a sense of humor, which is something

NIETZSCHE 197

Nietzsche, despite his brilliant intellectual wit, conspicu¬
ously lacked.

The conclusions we have reached here on a psychologi¬
cal level become confirmed when we turn to Nietzsche’s
systematic philosophy of power.

3 . POWER AND NIHILISM

Nietzsche is considered by many philosophers to be an
unsystematic thinker. This view, a mistaken one, is based
largely on the external form of his writings. He loved to
write aphoristically, to attack his subjects indirectly and
dramatically rather than in the straightforward solemn form
of a pedantic treatise; he was one of the great prose stylists
of the German language, and in his writing he could not,
or would not, deny the artist in himself. He even went so
far as to say that he was viewing science and philosophy
through the eyes of art. But beneath and throughout all
these belletristic forays a single consuming idea was mov¬
ing in him toward a systematized development. As think¬
ing gradually took over the whole person, and everything
else in his life being starved out, it was inevitable that this
thought should tend to close itself off in a system. At the
end of his life he was making notes for a great systematic
work which would be the complete expression of his phi¬
losophy. This work we now have in unfinished form in The
Will to Tower. The increase in systematization in Nietz¬
sche’s work is in many ways a psychological loss, since in
pursuing his thematic idea he lost sight of the ambiguity
in matters of the human psyche. However, there is a gain
as well, for by carrying his ideas to the end he lets us see
what they finally amount to. Heidegger has, in a recent
memorable essay, called attention to the hitherto unrecog¬
nized fact that Nietzsche is a thoroughly systematic thinker.
Indeed, according to Heidegger, Nietzsche is the last meta¬
physician in the metaphysical tradition of the West, the
thinker who at once completes and destroys that tradition.

We do not know when the idea of the Will to Power
first dawned upon Nietzsche, but there is a striking and

IRRATIONAL MAN

198

picturesque incident, which he later told to his sister, that
is relevant to it: During the Franco-Prussian War, when
Nietzsche was a hospital orderly, he saw one evening his
old regiment ride by, going into battle and perhaps to
death, and it came to him then that “the strongest and high¬
est will to life does not lie in the puny struggle to exist, but
in the Will to war, the Will to Power,” But it is a mistake to
locate the birth of this idea in any single experience; it was,
in fact, fed by a number of tributary streams, by Nietz¬
sche’s struggle against ill health and also by his studies
in classical antiquity. Nietzsche’s greatness as a classical
scholar lay in his ability to see plain and simple facts that
the genteel tradition among scholars had passed over. The
distinguished British classicist F. M. Comford has said of
Nietzsche that he was fifty years ahead of the classical
scholarship of his day; the tribute was meant to be gen¬
erous, but I am not sure that the classical scholarship of
our own day has yet caught up with Nietzsche. It requires
much more imagination to grasp the obvious than the
recondite, and a kind of imagination that Nietzsche had
much more of than the classical scholars of his time. Take,
for example, the obvious fact that the noble Greeks and
Romans owned slaves and thought this quite natural; and
that because of this they had a different orientation toward
existence than did the Christian civilization that followed
them. The humanistic tradition among classical scholars
had idealized the ancients, and thereby, as in all idealistic
views, falsified the reality. One does not need to be much
of a classical specialist to note, on the first page of Julius
Caesar’s Gallic Wars, that the word virtus, virtue, means
courage and martial valor—just the kind of thing that a mili¬
tary commander would most fear in the enemy and most
desire in his own soldiers. (It is one of the odd develop¬
ments of history—as one philosophical wag put it, making
thereby a perfectly Nietzschean joke—that the word “vir¬
tue,” which originally meant virility in a man, came in Vic¬
torian times to mean chastity in a woman.) Nor does it
require any greater classical scholarship to recognize in the
Greek word that we translate as virtue, arete, the clanging

NIETZSCHE

199

tone of Ares, god of battle. Classical civilizations rested on
the recognition of power, and the relations of power, as a
natural and basic part of life.

Nietzsche’s idea also reflected the modem influence of
Stendhal and Dostoevski, the two nineteenth-century nov¬
elists whom he most admired. Stendhal had shown the com¬
ponents of ego and power mingled in all the exploits of
Eros: in the arts of seduction and conquest, in the battle of
the sexes. Dostoevski had revealed how the most self-
abasing acts of humility could be brutally aggressive. Nietz¬
sche’s own psychological acuity, however, once started on
this path, did not need much prompting. He was able to
see the Will to Power secretly at work everywhere in the
history of morals: in the asceticism of the saint and the
resentment of the condemning moralist, as well as in the
brutality of the primitive legislator. All his separate insights
on the theme accumulated finally in a single monolithic
idea of all-comprehending universality: the Will to Power
was in fact the innermost essence of all beings; the essence
of Being itself.

Now, it is one thing to perceive that all the psychological
impulses of man are mingled in some way with the impulse
to power; it is quite another thing to say that this impulse
toward power is the basic impulse to which all the others
may be reduced. We are faced at once with that problem
of reduction which haunts particularly the battle among the
modem schools of psychology. As is well known, the in¬
dividual psychology of Alfred Adler split off from Freudian
psychoanalysis over just this point—Adler, who had read
Nietzsche, declaring that the Will to Power was basic,
Freud maintaining that sexuality and Eros were. But what
—to confound matters by speaking paradoxically—if both
are right and both wrong? What if the human psyche can¬
not be carved up into compartments and one compartment
wedged in under another as being more basic? What if such
dichotomizing really overlooks the organic unity of the hu¬
man psyche, which is such that a single impulse can be
just as much an impulse toward love on the one hand as
it is toward power on the other? Dostoevski, at least as a

200

IRBATIONAL, MAN

novelist, preserves this sense of duality and ambivalence;
and Nietzsche too, where his intuition was functioning as
concretely as a novelist’s, saw this interplay between power
and the other drives. (In Beyond Good and Evil he re¬
marked, rather as a good Freudian than an Adlerian, “The
degree and nature of a man’s sensuality extends to the high¬
est altitudes of his spirit.”) But later he had Zarathustra
the loveless declare that “Love is the danger of the loneliest
one,” and suppress love and compassion; and so Nietzsche
gave the last word to the Will to Power, making it the basis
of every other psychological motive; he became one of the
reductive psychologists.

What is most remarkable is that this Will to Power
should have been made by him into the essence of Being.
Remarkable because Nietzsche had ridiculed the very no¬
tion of Being as one of the most deceptive ghosts spawned
by the brains of philosophers, the most general and there¬
fore the emptiest of concepts, a thin and impalpable ecto¬
plasm distilled from the concrete realities of the senses. He
had perceived correctly that the principal conflict wi thin
Western philosophy lay at its very beginning, in Plato’s con¬
demnation of the poets and artists as inhabiting the world
of the senses rather than the supersensible world of the ab¬
stractions, the Ideas, which represent true Being as opposed
to the constant flux of Becoming in the world of the senses.
Nietzsche took the side of the artist; The real world, he
said, than which there is no other, is the world of the senses
and of Becoming. Nevertheless, to become a systematic
thinker Nietzsche had to become a metaphysician, and the
metaphysician is driven to have recourse to the idea of Be¬
ing. To be sure, Nietzsche’s thought preserves his dyna¬
mism, for Being is turned into Becoming—becomes, in fact,
essentially the Will to Power.

But what is power? It is not, according to Nietzsche, a
state of rest or stasis toward which all things tend. On the
contrary, power itself is dynamic through and through:
power consists in the discharge of power, and this means
the exercise of the will to power on ever-ascending levels of

NIETZSCHE

201

power. Power itself is the will to power. And the will to
power is the will to will.

It is at this point that Nietzsche’s doctrine begins to look
rather terrifying to most people, and to seem merely an ex¬
pression of his own frenetic and imbalanced temperament.
Frenetic he had certainly become, in many passages of The
Will to Power, where indeed he resembles nothing so much
as “the pale Criminal” of his own description (in Zarathus-
tra ), the loveless one who thirsts for blood. But here, as
elsewhere, the personal frenzy of Nietzsche had a much
more than personal meaning; and precisely in this idea of
power he was the philosopher of this present age in history,
for he revealed to it its own hidden and fateful being. No
wonder, then, that the age should have branded him as a
wicked and malevolent spirit.

The fact is that the modem age has prided itself every¬
where on its dynamism. In history textbooks we represent
the emergence of the modem period out of the Middle Ages
as the birth of an energetic and dynamic will to conquer
nature and transform the conditions of life, instead of sub¬
mitting passively to them while waiting to be sent to the
next world as medieval man had done. We congratulate
ourselves over and over again on all this. But when a thinker
comes along who seeks to explore what lies hidden behind
all this dynamism, we cry out that we do not recognize
ourselves in the image he draws and seek refuge from it
by pointing an accusing finger at his derangement. Tech¬
nology in the twentieth century has taken such enormous
strides beyond that of the nineteenth that it now bulks
larger as an instrument of naked power than as an instru¬
ment for human well-being. Now that we have airplanes
that fly faster than the sun, intercontinental missiles, space
satellites, and above all atomic explosives, we are aware
that technology itself has assumed a power to which politics
in any traditional sense is subordinate. If the Russians were
to outstrip us decisively in technology, then all ordinary po¬
litical calculations would have to go by the boards. The
classical art of politics, conceived since the Greeks as a thor¬
oughly human art addressed to humans, becomes an out-

202

IRRATIONAL MAN

moded and fragile thing beside the massive accumulation
of technological power. The fate of the world, it now ap¬
pears, turns upon sheer mastery over things. All the refine¬
ments of politics as a human art—diplomatic tact and
finesse, compromise, an enlightened and liberal policy, good
will—are as little able to avail against technological suprem¬
acy as the refinement of a man’s dress and person are able
to ward off the blow of a pile driver. The human becomes
subordinated to the machine, even in the traditionally hu¬
man business of politics.

Here Nietzsche, more acutely than Marx, expresses the
real historical meaning of Communism and especially of the
peculiar attraction Communism holds for the so-called
backward or underdeveloped countries: it is a will to power
on the part of these peoples, a will to take their fate in
their own hands and make their own history. This power¬
ful and secret appeal of Communism is something that our
own statesmen do not seem in the least to understand. And
America itself? Yes, we bear with us still the old liberal
ideals of the individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pur¬
suit of happiness; but the actual day-to-day march of our
collective life involves us in a frantic dynamism whose ulti¬
mate goals are undefined. Everywhere in the world, men
and nations are behaving precisely in accordance with the
Nietzschean metaphysics: The goal of power need not be
defined, because it is its own goal, and to halt or slacken
speed even for a moment would be to fall behind in achiev¬
ing it. Power does not stand still; as we say nowadays in
America, you are either going up or coming down.

But on what, philosophically speaking, does this cele¬
brated dynamism of the modem age rest? The modem era
in philosophy is usually taken to begin with Descartes. The
fundamental feature of Descartes’ thought is a dualism be¬
tween the ego and the external world of nature. The ego
is the subject, essentially a thinking substance; nature is the
world of objects, extended substances. Modem philosophy
thus begins with a radical subjectivism, the subject fac¬
ing the object in a kind of hidden antagonism. (This sub¬
jectivism has nothing to do with Kierkegaard’s idea of

NIETZSCHE

203

“subjective truth”; Kierkegaard simply chose his term un¬
fortunately, for his intention is the very opposite of Carte-
sianism.) Nature thus appears as a realm to be conquered,
and man as the creature who is to be conqueror of it. This
is strikingly shown in the remark of Francis Bacon, prophet
of the new science, who said that in scientific investigation
man must put nature to the rack in order to wring from
it an answer to his questions; the metaphor is one of
coercion and violent antagonism. A crucial step beyond
Descartes was taken when Leibniz declared that material
substances are not inert, as Descartes thought, but endowed
with a fundamental dynamism: all things have a certain
drive ( appetitio) by which they move forward in time.
Here the Cartesian antagonism between man and nature is
stepped up by having added to it an intrinsic dynamism on
both sides. Nietzsche is the culmination of this whole line
of thought: the thinker who brings the seed to its violent
fruition. The very extremity of his idea points to a funda¬
mental error at the source of the modem epoch. Whether
or not it points beyond that to a fundamental error at the
root of the whole Western tradition, as Heidegger holds, is
another matter, and one that we shall examine in the con¬
text of Heidegger’s own philosophy.

Power as the pursuit of more power inevitably founders
in the void that lies beyond itself. The Will to Power begets
the problem of nihilism. Here again Nietzsche stands as the
philosopher of the period, for he prophesied remarkably
that nihilis m would be the shadow, in many guises and
forms, that would haunt the twentieth century. Supposing
man does not blow himself and his earth to bits, and that
he really becomes the master of this planet. What then?
He pushes off into interstellar space. And then? Power for
power’s sake, no matter how far the power is extended,
leaves always the dread of the void beyond. The attempt to
stand face to face with that void is the problem of nihilism.

For Nietzsche, the problem of nihilism arose out of the
discovery that “God is dead.” “God” here means the his¬
torical God of the Christian faith. But in a wider philo¬
sophical sense it means also the whole realm of supersensi-

IRRATIONAL MAN

204

ble reality—Platonic Ideas, the Absolute, or what not—that
philosophy has traditionally posited beyond the sensible
realm, and in which it has located man’s highest values.
Now that this other, higher, eternal realm is gone, Nietz¬
sche declared, man’s highest values lose their value. If man
has lost this anchor to which he has hitherto been moored,
Nietzsche asks, will he not drift in an infinite void? The
only value Nietzsche can set up to take the place of these
highest values that have lost their value for contemporary
man is: Power.

But do we today really have any better answer? An an¬
swer, I mean, that we five and not just pay lip service to?
Nietzsche is more truly the philosopher for our age than
we are willing to admit. To the degree that modem life
has become secularized those highest values, anchored in
the eternal, have already lost their value. So long as people
are blissfully unaware of this, they of course do not sink
into any despondency and nihilism; they may even be
steady churchgoers. Nihilism, in fact, is the one subject on
which we speak today with the self-complacency of com¬
mencement-day orators. We are always ready to invoke the
term against a new book or new play that has anything
“negative” to say, as if nihilism were always to be found in
the other person but never in ourselves. And yet despite
all its apparently cheerful and self-satisfied immersion in
gadgets and refrigerators American life, one suspects, is
nihilistic to its core. Its final “What for?” is not even asked,
let alone answered.

Man, Nietzsche held, is a contradictory and complex be¬
ing, and he himself is as complex and contradictory an ex¬
ample as one could find. One has the feeling in reading
him that those ultimate problems with which he dealt
would have been enough almost to drive any man mad.
Was it necessary that he be deranged in order to reveal
the secret derangement that lies coiled like a dragon at the
bottom of our epoch? He does not bring us any solutions
that satisfy us to the great questions he raises, but he has
stated the central and cmcial problems for man in this pe-

NIETZSCHE 205

nod, as no one else has, and therein lies at once his great¬
ness and his challenge.

And Nietzsche’s fate might very well prefigure our own,
for unless our Faustian civilization can relax its frantic
dynamism at some point, it might very well go psychotic.
To primitives and Orientals, we Western men already seem
half crazy. But it will not do merely to assert blandly that
the tension of this dynamism has to be relaxed somehow
and somewhere; we need to know what in our fundamental
way of thinking needs to be changed so that the frantic
will to power will not appear as the only meaning we can
give to human life. If this moment in Western history is
but the fateful outcome of the fundamental ways of thought
that He at the very basis of our civifization—and particularly
of that way of thought that sunders man from nature, sees
nature as a realm of objects to be mastered and conquered,
and can therefore end only with the exaltation of the will
to power—then we have to find out how this one-sided and
ultimately nihili stic emphasis upon the power over things
may be corrected.

This means that philosophers must take up the task
of rethinking Nietzsche’s problems back to their sources,
which happen also to be the sources of our whole Western
tradition. The most thoroughgoing attempt at this, among
philosophers in the twentieth century, has been made by
Heidegger, who is, as we shall now see, engaged in nothing
less than the Herculean task of digging his way patiently
and laboriously out of the Nietzschean ruins, Hke a survivor
out of a bombed city.

HEIDEGGER

Chapter Nine

Wecannothear the cry of Nietzsche, Heidegger tells
us, until we ourselves begin to think. And lest we fancy this
an easy and obvious thing to do, he adds: “Thinking only
begins at the point where we have come to know that Rea¬
son, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary
of thinking.”

This rather sensational opposition of thinking to reason
goes against all the catch phrases of our culture. Heidegger
is not a rationalist, because reason operates by means of
concepts, mental representations, and our existence eludes
these. But he is not an irrationalist either. Irrationalism
holds that feeling, or will, or instinct are more valuable and
indeed more truthful than reason—as in fact, from the point
of view of life itself, they are. But irrationalism surrenders
the field of thinking to rationalism and thereby secretly
comes to share the assumptions of its enemy. What is
needed is a more fundamental kind of thinking that will
cut under both opposites. Heidegger’s statement points
backward through the whole philosophic tradition with
which his own thought is intended as a decisive break and
at the same time forward to a new territory in which, as
he says of himself, he is like a wanderer lost in a forest,
attempting to mark out trails. And his statement tells us
that if we his contemporaries would assimilate his thought,
we too must learn to think, even in opposition to all our
inherited rigidities of reason; think more rigorously than
rationalism ever did.

HEIDEGGER

207

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche fell like block-busters upon
the quiet world of academic philosophy. They were philos¬
ophers outside the Academy, a new and revolutionary thing
for modem times, and consequently they wrote not as pro¬
fessors but as poets: their books are passionate and colorful,
addressed to all men and not merely to the professionals.
Heidegger by contrast is a thoroughly academic figure, a
professor, and the mark of this is upon all his writings. He
never expresses himself with the radical boldness and pas¬
sion of a Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, but his message swathed
though it may be in academic and formal lingo may never¬
theless prove in the end to be as dramatic and fateful a
bombshell as were those of his two predecessors.

Heidegger clearly belongs—as may be gathered from the
statement of his quoted above—to that line of development
within modem culture that we discussed earlier (in Chap¬
ter 6) as the flight from Laputa. But his escape from the
aery realm of pure reason has been planned more system¬
atically and quietly than those of the other antagonists of
Laputa, and in carrying it out Heidegger reaches back be¬
yond the situation of modem man into the beginnings of
Western thought among the Greeks. Both Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche point up a profound dissociation, or split, that
has taken place in the being of Western man, which is
basically the conflict of reason with the whole man. Accord¬
ing to Kierkegaard, reason threatens to swallow up faith;
Western man now stands at a crossroads forced to choose
either to be religious or to fall into despair. Having chosen
the former, he must, being rooted historically in Christian¬
ity, enact a radical renewal of the Christian faith. For
Nietzsche the era of reason and science raises the question
of what is to be done with the primitive instincts and pas¬
sions of man; in pushing these latter aside the age threatens
us with a decline in vitality for the whole species. What
lies behind both prophetic messages is the perception that
man is estranged from his own being. Now, the estrange¬
ment from Being itself is Heidegger’s central theme. But he
attacks this problem on its own terms and as a systematic
thinker, and so his writings do not shine with the bold and

208

IRRATIONAL MAN

striking colors of religious and psychological prophecy. The
emotional, vital, and religious regeneration of modem man
is something altogether outside his concern as a thinker. The
problem as he puts it to himself is quite different: Granted
that modem man has tom himself up by his roots, might
not the cause of this he farther back in his past than he
thinks? Might it not, in fact, he in the way in which he
thinks about the most fundamental of all things, Being it¬
self? And might not a more rooted kind of thinking—rooted
in Being—lead the rootless Laputan back to the earth? Hei¬
degger deals in a radical way with the celebrated alienation
of modem man, and indeed with the problem of man gen¬
erally, by subordinating it to something else, without which
man can never regain his roots: to Being itself.

Heidegger’s text is on the whole so austerely devoid of
metaphor that when one does occur it stands out in our
memory like a solitary tree on a plain. In one of his more
exoteric messages, the Letter on Humanism (1947), Hei¬
degger concludes with an especially memorable figure that
describes very aptly the whole direction of his own thought:
the thinker, he says, is trying to trace a furrow in human
language as the peasant traces a furrow across a field.
Heidegger himself is of peasant stock, strongly attached to
his native region of southern Germany, and one feels this
attachment to the soil in his thinking. “Remain true to the
earth,” Zarathustra had counseled his followers; and Hei¬
degger as a thinker, despite the apparent abstractness of
his themes, comes much closer to obeying this counsel than
did the unlucky Nietzsche. The picture of man that emerges
from Heidegger’s pages is of an earth-bound, time-bound,
radically finite creature—precisely the image of man we
should expect from a peasant, in this case a peasant who
has the whole history of Western philosophy at his finger¬
tips. And for precisely this reason if for no other we today,
who have gone so far from the soil, ought to find great
significance in this philosophy.

In this same Letter on Humanism Heidegger also permits
himself a brief personal aside, which is also rare in the
scrupulous impersonality of his writings. He is complaining

HEIDEGGER

209

about some of the misunderstandings of his thought (and
on this score he has good grounds for complaint), and he
remarks: “Because we hark hack to Nietzsche’s saying
aho-ut the ‘death of God,’ people take such an enterprise
for atheism. For what is more ‘logical’ than to consider the
man who has experienced the ‘death of God’ as a Godless
person.” Even here the personal meaning is oblique; Hei¬
degger refers to himself objectively and in the third person.
Nevertheless, it is the closest he comes in his writings to a
personal spiritual confession. Heidegger has experienced the
death of God, and this death casts a shadow over all his
writings; but he announces it quietly, almost indirectly,
while the madman in Nietzsche’s Joyful Wisdom shouted
it out in the market place. And this change of tone in itself
shows how far history has moved from Nietzsche’s day,
when the discovery of God’s death was a rending and
prophetic vision, to our own, when the death of God is ad¬
mitted calmly and the thinker tries to take sober stock of
the situation. Heidegger’s philosophy is neither atheism nor
theism, but a description of the world from which God is
absent. It is now the night of the world, Heidegger says,
quoting the poet Holderlin; the god has withdrawn him¬
self, as the sun sets below the horizon. And meanwhile the
thinker can only redeem the time by seeking to understand
what is at once nearest and farthest from man: his own
being and Being itself. Heidegger has described Holderlin’s
poetry as a “temple without a shrine,” a description which
really fits his own philosophy. If the god, reborn, returns,
his temple will be ready for him, thanks to Heidegger; but
it will take someone else, with a little more fire, to build
the shrine and light the candles. And if the god does not
come back, the temple can be converted into an imposing,
if bleak, secular edifice, as in the case of Sartre, the atheist
engage. Both atheist and theist have to reckon with Heideg¬
ger’s thought, for he is dealing with matters with which
both will have to come to terms, if in their separate creeds
they are to measure up to the height of our times. It may
even be that atheism and theism, as public creeds, matter

210

IRRATIONAL MAN

less than our becoming alive to these things that Heidegger
is struggling to bring to light.

1. BEING

But what about Being, the reader may ask, impatiently.
After so many centuries can we really be told something
new and significant—above all, significant to us as busy
modems—on this apparently very remote and abstract sub¬
ject? The impatience itself comes out of a certain attitude
or orientation toward Being, of which we are on the whole
unconscious. We want to know about things, beings, and
particularly we want to have information about definite and
observable traits of these beings; what lies behind this, in
the enveloping background of all beings, seems to have lit¬
tle to do with our practical needs, the bulk of which are
concerned with mastering the things in our environment.
This is nothing less than the endemic positivism of our age;
and there is no doubt that Positivism as a philosophy has
simply given expression to this prevailing attitude toward
Being.

Nevertheless, Being has been the central and dominating
concept of twenty-five hundred years of Western philoso¬
phy; and if we are going to jettison all that past, we ought
at least to know what was at stake, intellectually speaking,
in the slow unfolding of those centuries. Some of our
present-day philosophers fortify the prejudice of the age by
telling us that the concern with Being is merely a linguistic
accident, due to the fact that the Indo-European languages
have the copula “to be,” whereas other languages have no
such word and consequently no empty verbal battles about
the meaning of Being. But the Indo-European languages
cut a pretty wide swath in history, and it happens to be our
swath, our tradition, with which we must come to terms.

That tradition itself, however, is also to blame for our
contemporary indifference to Being. And precisely in this
matter the bold quality of Heidegger’s thought shows itself:
he is working within this tradition but he is also seeking to
destroy it—destroy it creatively so that it may surpass itself.

HEIDEGGER

211

In his greatest book, Sein tmd Zeit (Being and Time) pub¬
lished in 1927, which has become a kind of systematic
Bible—sometimes almost an unread Bible—of modem Exis¬
tentialism, he proposed no less a task than a “repetition”
of the problem of Being: a repetition in the sense of a radi¬
cal renewal, a fetching back from the oblivion of the past
the problem as the first Greek thinkers confronted it. This
aspect of the book, however, got lost amid the excitement
over Heidegger’s dramatic and moving descriptions of hu¬
man existence—of death, care, anxiety, guilt, and the rest;
and critics have gone so far as to see in his later writings,
which lack such topics of human interest, a break and
change in his thought. This is a mistake, for the singleness
and continuity of Heidegger’s thinking is such that all his
later writings can be considered as commentaries and elu¬
cidations of what was already in germ in his Being and
Time. He has never ceased from that single task, the “repe¬
tition” of the problem of Being: the standing face to face
with Being as did the earliest Greeks. And on the very first
pages of Being and Time he tells us that this task involves
nothing less than the destruction of the whole history of
Western ontology—that is, of the way the West has thought
about Being.

Why should this be necessary? And, to go back to our
previous point, how has the tradition itself been responsi¬
ble for our contemporary indifference to Being?

In the first place, the word “being” is ambiguous in Eng¬
lish. As a participle, it has at once the characteristics of
verb and noun. As a noun, it is a name for beings, things:
a table is a being, as is the tree outside the window, etc.,
etc. Anything that is is a being. This we can recognize even
though we find the fact that it is a being the most empty
and abstract (and therefore nugatory) characteristic of any
thing. But in its aspect as a verb “being” signifies the “to-be”
of things, and for this we have no single word in English,
perhaps because this is even more difficult to conceive.
Other languages do have a more adequate vocabulary here
and pair off the two meanings neatly: in Greek, to on (the
thing which is) and to einai (the Being of the thing which

212

IRRATIONAL MAN

is); in Latin, ens and esse; in French, Vetant and Vitre; in
German, das Seiende and das Sein. (Heidegger’s suggestion
is that the best accommodation to this usage we can find in
English would be: beings, where we mean the things that
are, and Being, where we mean the to-be of whatever is;
and we shall keep to this suggestion in what follows.)

Now, it is Heidegger’s contention that the whole history
of Western thought has shown an exclusive preoccupa¬
tion with the first member of these pairs, with the thing-
which-is, and has let the second, the to-be of what is, fall
into oblivion. Thus that part of philosophy which is sup¬
posed to deal with Being is traditionally called ontology—
the science of the thing-which-is—and not einai-logy, which
would be the study of the to-be of Being as opposed to
beings. This observation may look like a piece of scholarly
pettifoggery, but it is not. What it means is nothing less
than this: that from the beginning the thought of Western
man has been bound to things, to objects. The whole history
of the West takes its fateful course from this fact, and by
starting from it Heidegger is able—simply out of his single-
minded preoccupation with Being—to throw new light on
that history and thereby on the present situation of the
world.

Once Being has been understood solely in terms of be¬
ings, things, it becomes the most general and empty of con¬
cepts: “The first object of the understanding,” says St.
Thomas Aquinas, “that which the intellect conceives when
it conceives of anything.” Thus, a table is an article of furni¬
ture; articles of furniture are human artifacts; human arti¬
facts are physical things; and then, with the next jump of
generalization, I can say of this table merely that it is a
being, a thing. “Being” is the ultimate generalization I can
make about the thing, and therefore the most abstract term
I can apply to it, and it gives me no useful information
about the table at all. Hence the ordinary person’s impa¬
tience, which we have noted, on hearing any talk about Be¬
ing at all: it is something that does not concern him or any
of his vital needs. But here again Heidegger overturns the
traditional applecart: Being is not an empty abstraction but

HEIDEGGER

213

something in which all of us are immersed up to our necks,
and indeed over our heads. We all understand the meaning
in ordinary life of the word “is,” though we are not called
upon to give a conceptual explanation of it. Our ordinary
human life moves within a preconceptual understanding of
Being, and it is this everyday understanding of Being in
which we live, move, and have our Being that Heidegger
wants to get at as a philosopher. Far from being the most
remote and abstract of concepts, Being is the most concrete
and closest of presences; literally, the concern of every man.
This preconceptual understanding of Being is given to most
men—I remark to a neighbor, “Today is Monday,” and
there are no questions asked, and none need be asked, about
the meaning of “is”; and without this understanding man
could not understand anything else. But this does not in the
least mean that this preconceptual understanding has been
brought into the light. On the contrary, it remains in the
dark because for most ordinary purposes we need not ask
any questions about it. The whole aim of Heidegger’s think¬
ing is to bring this sense of Being into the light.

2. PHENOMENOLOGY AND HUMAN
EXISTENCE

But how is something so banal, so close and yet so hid¬
den, to be brought into the light? Here Heidegger makes
use of an instrument, phenomenology, borrowed from his
teacher, Edmund Husserl; but in adopting the instrument
he gives it a different sense and direction from Husserl’s.
The difference is at once a difference of temperament be¬
tween the two philosophers and a radical difference be¬
tween their philosophies. For Husserl, phenomenology was
a discipline that attempts to describe what is given to us
in experience without obscuring preconceptions or hypo¬
thetical speculations; his motto was “to the things them¬
selves”—rather than to the prefabricated conceptions we
put in their place. As Husserl saw it, this attempt offered
the only way out of the impasse into which philosophy had
nm at the end of the nineteenth century when the realists.

214

IRRATIONAL MAN

who affirmed the independent existence of the object, and
the idealists, who affirmed the priority of the subject, had
settled down into a stalemated war. Instead of making in¬
tellectual speculations about the whole of reality, philoso¬
phy must turn, Husserl declared, to a pure description of
what is. In taking this position Husserl became the most
influential force not only upon Heidegger but upon the
whole generation of German philosophers who came to ma¬
turity about the time of the First World War.

Heidegger accepts Husserl’s definition of phenomenol¬
ogy: he will attempt to describe, he says, and without any
obscuring preconceptions, what human existence is. But his
imagination could not let the matter go at this, for he noted
that the word “phenomenon” comes from the Greek. The
etymologies of words, particularly of Greek words, are a
passion with Heidegger; in his pursuit of them he has been
accused of playing with words, but when one realizes what
deposits of truth mankind has let slip into its language as
it evolves, Heidegger’s perpetual digging at words to get at
their hidden nuggets of meaning is one of his most exciting
facets. In the matter of Greek particularly—a dead lan¬
guage, whose whole history is now spread out before us—
we can see how certain truths are embedded in the lan¬
guage itself: truths that the Greek race later came to forget
in its thinking. The word "phenomenon”—a word in ordi¬
nary usage, by this time, in all modem European languages
—means in Greek “that which reveals itself.” Phenomenol¬
ogy therefore means for Heidegger the attempt to let the
thing speak for itself. It will reveal itself to us, he says, only
if we do not attempt to coerce it into one of our ready¬
made conceptual strait jackets. Here we get the beginning
of his rejoinder to the Nietzschean view that knowledge is
in the end an expression of the Will to Power: according to
Heidegger we do not know the object by conquering and
subduing it but rather by letting it be what it is and, in
letting it be, allowing it to reveal itself as what it is. And
our own human existence too, in its most immediate, inter¬
nal nuances, will reveal itself if we have ears to hear it.

The etymological harvest does not stop with the single

HEIDEGGER

215

word "phenomenology.” Heidegger finds around that word
a whole cluster of etymologies, all of them having an inter¬
nal unity of meaning that brings us to the very center of
his thought. The Greek word phainomenon is connected
with the word phaos, fight, and also with the word
apophansis, statement or speech. The sequence of ideas is
thus: revelation-light-language. The fight is the fight of
revelation, and language itself is in this fight. These may
look like mere metaphors, but perhaps they are so only for
us, whose understanding is darkened; for early man, at the
very dawn of the Greek language, this inner fink between
fight and statement (language) was a simple and pro¬
found fact, and it is our sophistication and abstractness that
makes it seem to us “merely” metaphorical.

This metaphor of fight, as we shall see, opens the way to
Heidegger’s theory of truth, which is for him one of the
most fateful issues in human history and human thought.
The etymology of the Greek word for truth, a-letheia, is
another key to Heidegger’s theory: the word means, liter¬
ally, un-hiddenness, revelation. Truth occurs when what
has been hidden is no longer so. If we put this alongside
the previous ideas of revelation-fight-language, then the
importance of the idea Heidegger is getting at may emerge.
It is an idea, in fact, that challenges altogether the view
of “truth” usually held nowadays, as something to be
ascribed only to statements or propositions: a statement is
true, for us, when it corresponds to fact. But statements do
not exist without the minds that comprehend them; and
truth is therefore, in modem usage, to be found in the mind
when it has a correct judgment about what is the case. The
trouble with this view is that it cannot take account of
other manifestations of truth. For example, we speak of the
“truth” of a work of art. A work of art in which we find
truth may actually have in it no propositions that are true
in this literal sense. The truth of the work of art is in its
being a revelation, but that revelation does not consist in
a statement or group of statements that are intellectually
correct. The momentous assertion that Heidegger makes is
that truth does not reside primarily in the intellect, but

2l6

IRRATIONAL MAN

that, on the contrary, intellectual truth is in fact a derivative
of a more basic sense of truth.

What this more basic sense of truth is, we shall deal with
fully in a moment. We must point out, however, before we
do so, that the question of truth arose as soon as we be¬
gan to outline the Heideggerian view of human existence.
Critics have usually got at Heidegger's thought by a more
sensational route. The Italian commentator Ruggieri, for
example, describes Existentialism with colorful superficial¬
ity as “philosophy done in the style of a thriller or crime
novel”—no doubt because it scandalizes the academic phi¬
losopher to hear talk about such urgent human matters as
death, care, anxiety, and the like. Heidegger does discuss
these questions; but before we can deal with his attitude
to them we must understand his view of man as a being
who is situated in a certain relation to truth. Indeed, what
man becomes—in his history as well as his thinking—turns
upon the decision he makes as to what truth is. Critics who
find sensationalism in Heidegger find it because that is what
they are looking for.

It is by harking back to the primeval meaning of truth
as it became embedded in the Greek language, that Hei¬
degger takes his theory, in a single leap, beyond the bound¬
aries of Husserlian phenomenology. Husserl was still rooted
in the point of view of Descartes, which is the prevailing
view of the modem epoch in philosophy, while the whole
meaning of Heidegger’s thought is as an effort to overcome
Descartes.

By doubting all things Descartes arrived at a single cer¬
tainty: the existence of his own consciousness—the famous
Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” This is the
point at which modem philosophy, and with it the modem
epoch, begins: man is locked up in his own ego. Outside
him is the doubtful world of things, which his science has
now taught him are really not the least like their familiar
appearances. Descartes got the external world back through
a belief in God, who in His goodness would not deceive
us into believing that this external world existed if it really
did not. But the ghost of subjectivism (and solipsism too)

HEIDEGGER

217

is there and haunts the whole of modem philosophy. David
Hume, in a moment of acute skepticism, felt panicky in
the solitude of his study and had to go out and join his
friends in the billiard room in order to be reassured that
the external world was really there. And Leibniz expressed
the whole thing in a powerful image when he said of his
monads, the ultimate substances of the world, that they
had no windows—i.e., did not communicate with each
other.

And for Descartes, though he might allow himself mo¬
ments of doubting the external world, the fact is that the
existence of things took priority when it came to under¬
standing the Being of man. What are external things?
Bodies, extended substances. In contrast the ego, the I, is
an immaterial substance, a thinking substance. And just as
various qualities—color, shape, and so on—“inhere” in a
physical substance, so what we call psychic states—moods
or thoughts—“inhere” in a soul substance. Though man
and nature are irremediably split off from each other, se¬
cretly what takes place is that the Being of man is always
understood in analogy to physical substances. While mod¬
em thought has split off man from nature, it has tried never¬
theless to understand man in terms of physical realities.

Heidegger destroys the Cartesian picture at one blow:
what characterizes man essentially, he says, is that he is
Being-in-the-world. Leibniz had said that the monad has
no windows; and Heidegger’s reply is that man does not
look out upon an external world through windows, from
the isolation of his ego: he is already out-of-doors. He is in
the world because, existing, he is involved in it totally. Ex¬
istence itself, according to Heidegger, means to stand
outside oneself, to be beyond oneself. My Being is not
something that takes place inside my skin (or inside an im¬
material substance inside that skin); my Being, rather, is
spread over a field or region which is the world of its care
and concern. Heidegger’s theory of man (and of Being)
might be called the Field Theory of Man (or the Field
Theory of Being) in analogy with Einstein’s Field Theory
of Matter, provided we take this purely as an analogy; for

2x8

IRRATIONAL MAN

Heidegger would hold it a spurious and inauthentic way
to philosophize to derive one’s philosophic conclusions from
the highly abstract theories of physics. But in the way that
Einstein took matter to be a field (a magnetic field, say)
—in opposition to the Newtonian conception of a body as
existing inside its surface boundaries—so Heidegger takes
man to be a field or region of Being. Think of a magnetic
field without the solid body of the magnet at its center;
man’s Being is such a field, but there is no soul substance
or ego substance at the center from which that field
radiates.

Heidegger calls this field of Being Dasein. Dasein (which,
in German, means literally Being-there) is his name for
man. One of the most remarkable things about Heidegger’s
description of human existence is that it is made without
his using the term “man” at all! He thereby avoids the as¬
sumption that we are dealing with a definite object with
a fixed nature—that we already know, in short, what man is.
His analysis of existence also takes place without the use
of the word “consciousness,” for this word threatens to
bring us back into the Cartesian dualism. That Heidegger
can say everything he wants to say about human existence
without using either “man” or “consciousness” means that
the gulf between subject and object, or between mind and
body, that has been dug by modem philosophy need not
exist if we do not make it. Far from being arbitrary, his
terminology is extremely deliberate and shrewd.

Now, there is nothing at all remote or abstract about
this idea of man, or Dasein, as a field. It checks with our
everyday observation in the case of the child who has just
learned to respond to his own name. He comes promptly
enough at being called by name; but if asked to point out
the person to whom the name belongs, he is just as likely
to point to Mommy or Daddy as to himself—to the frustra¬
tion of both eager parents. Some months later, asked the
same question, the child will point to himself. But before
he has reached that stage, he has heard his name as nam¬
ing a field or region of Being with which he is concerned,
and to which he responds, whether the call is to come to

HEIDEGGER

219

food, to mother, or whatever. And the child is right. His
name is not the name of an existence that takes place
within the envelope of his skin: that is merely the awfully
abstract social convention that has imposed itself not
only on his parents but on the history of philosophy. The
basic meaning the child’s name has for him does not dis¬
appear as he grows older; it only becomes covered over by
the more abstract social convention. He secretly hears his
own name called whenever he hears any region of Being
named with which he is vitally involved.

It takes a little time to get used to this Heideggerian
notion of a field, but once familiar it is at once inevitable
and natural and alters our whole way of looking at the hu¬
man person. To be sure, this existence is always mine; it
is not an impersonal fact, as the existence of a table is
merely to be an individual case of the class table. Never¬
theless, the mine-ness of my existence does not consist in
the fact that there is an I-substance at the center of my
field, but rather in that this mine-ness permeates the whole
field of my Being.

Heidegger has with this notion planted both feet solidly
in that banal, public, everyday world of our experience.
Philosophers in the past have construed existence from a
much different point of view—that of a privileged mode of
experience, the solitude of reflection. The thought of a Des¬
cartes or Hume smells of this solitude, of the private cham¬
ber or study in which a man may toy with the doubt of an
external world. In the daylight of everyday experience such
doubts become unreal; they do not need to be refuted, they
simply fade away, for they do not apply to the existence
that we actually live.

In this everyday prephilosophical world in which we
live, in which even Descartes and Hume lived though they
forgot it, none of us is a private Self confronting a world
of external objects. None of us is yet even a Self. We are
each simply one among many; a name among the names
of our schoolfellows, our fellow citizens, our community.
This everyday public quality of our existence Heidegger
calls “the One.” The One is the impersonal and public

220

IRRATIONAL MAN

creature whom each of us is even before he is an I, a real
I. One has such-and-such a position in life, one is expected
to behave in such-and-such a manner, one does this, one
does not do that, etc., etc. We exist thus in a state of
“fallen-ness” ( Verfallenheit ), according to Heidegger, in
the sense that we are as yet below the level of existence
to which it is possible for us to rise. So long as we remain
in the womb of this externalized and public existence, we
are spared the terror and the dignity of becoming a Self.
But, as happened to Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy’s story, such
things as death and anxiety intrude upon this fallen state,
destroy our sheltered position of simply being one among
many, and reveal to us our own existence as fearfully and
irremediably our own. Because it is less fearful to be “the
One” than to be a Self, the modem world has wonderfully
multiplied all the devices of self-evasion.

Whether it be fallen or risen, inauthentic or authentic,
counterfeit copy or genuine original, human existence is
marked by three general traits: (1) mood or feeling;
(2) understanding; (3) speech. Heidegger calls these
existentialia and intends them as basic categories of exist¬
ence. As categories they seem at first glance rather strange,
for other philosophers’ categories—quantity, quality, space,
time, etc.—are very different. These latter, which the tradi¬
tion from Aristotle onward makes the fundamental cate¬
gories of Being, are all categories of physical objects. But
human existence cannot be understood as a thing, and
therefore cannot be characterized by categories that are
derived from things. This does not mean, however, that
Heidegger intends his three existentialia to refer to internal
states of some purely mental entity or soul substance.
Rather, they must be understood in terms of Heidegger’s
view of Dasein, human existence, as a field.

(1) Mood. What is a mood really? We tend to think of
it as an internal state. But when we do so, we are still
thinking of it as inhering in some nuclear substance of our¬
selves, a soul or ego, as the color of a table inheres in the
table. We do not actually have our moods in this way.
Strictly speaking, we do not “have” them at all as we might

HEIDEGGER

221

“have” articles of furniture stored away in some interior
attic. The mood, rather, penetrates the whole field of Being
that we are. The German word for mood, Stimmung, has
the root sense of being attuned, and in a mood our whole
Being is attuned in a certain way. We are a certain joy,
sadness, dread. It leavens and permeates the whole of our
existence.

Moreover, in every mood or feeling I suddenly find my¬
self here and now within my situation, within my world.
Dasein, as we have seen, means to be there—or perhaps, as
we might more commonly say in English, to be here and
now—and in every mood I come to myself here and now
in a certain way. Whether the mood be slight, almost im¬
palpable, or a volcanic eruption, what always reveals itself
if I give it heed is my own Being-there in its world in a
certain way. The fundamental mood, according to Heideg¬
ger, is anxiety (Angst ); he does not choose this as primary
out of any morbidity of temperament, however, but simply
because in anxiety this here-and-now of our existence
arises before us in all its precarious and porous contingency.

Notice that Heidegger is talking about moods or feelings
as modes of Being. He is propounding not psychology but
ontology, but in so doing he is also recasting our whole
understanding of psychological matters. Man is illuminated
by letting Being reveal itself, and not vice versa. The whole
approach is decidedly not anthropocentric.

(2) Understanding. The understanding Heidegger refers
to here is not abstract or theoretical; it is the understanding
of Being in which our existence is rooted, and without
which we could not make propositions or theories that can
claim to be “true.” As such it lies underneath and at the
basis of our ordinary conceptual understanding. We open
our eyes in the morning, and the world opens before us.
We do not reflect enough on what happens in this simple
act of seeing—namely, that the world opens around us as
we see. This open-ness, or standing open, of the world
must always be given, even for the most humble human
existent, whose mind might be quite devoid of ideas and
who might claim no specifically intellectual understanding

222

IRRATIONAL MAN

of the world at all. Without this open-ness he could not
exist, for to exist means to stand beyond himself in a world
that opens before him. In this world that lies before him,
open beneath the light, things lie unconcealed (also con¬
cealed); but unconcealedness, or un-hiddenness, for Hei¬
degger, is truth; and therefore so far as man exists, he exists
“in the truth.” (At the same time, because he is finite, he
must always exist “in untruth.”) Truth and Being are thus
inseparable, given always together, in the simple sense
that a world with things in it opens up around man the
moment he exists. Most of the time, however, man does not
let himself see what really happens in seeing.

Here is an example: An intellectual approaches to tell
me a new “theory” of his. The theory may be about a new
book, another person, or some new twist in psychoanalysis
—it does not matter. (Suppose, to make our illustration
more concrete at least for some readers, that this intellec¬
tual is one of that peculiarly traditionless, deracinated, and
therefore cerebral breed, the New York intellectual.) As
soon as I hear his theory, I know it to be false. Challenged
to give arguments against it, I may stumble inarticulately;
in some cases, indeed, I find it not worth while to give a
rebuttal, for the ideas ring false the moment they strike my
ear. Some dumb inarticulated understanding, some sense of
truth planted, as it were, in the marrow of my bones, makes
me know that what I am hearing is not true. Whence comes
this understanding? It is the understanding that I have by
virtue of being rooted in existence. It is the kind of under¬
standing we all have when confronted with ideas that we
know to be false even though it may take us a long time
to articulate reasons for rejecting them. If we did not have
this understanding, we could never utter any propositions
as true or false. We become rootless intellectually to the
degree that we lose our hold upon this primary form of
understanding, which is there in the act of opening our
eyes upon the world.

(3) Speech. Language, for Heidegger, is not primarily
a system of sounds or of marks on paper symbolizing those
sounds. Sounds and marks upon paper can become lan-

HEIDEGGER

223

guage only because man, insofar as he exists, stands within
language. This looks very paradoxical; but, as with the rest
of Heidegger, to understand what he means we have to
cast off our usual habits of thought and let ourselves see
what the thing is—i.e., let the thing itself be seen rather
than riding roughshod over it with ready-made conceptions.

Two people are talking together. They understand each
other, and they fall silent—a long silence. This silence is
language; it may speak more eloquently than any words.
In their mood they are attuned to each other; they may
even reach down into that understanding which, as we have
seen above, lies below the level of articulation. The three-
mood, understanding, and speech (a speech here that is
silence)—thus interweave and are one. This significant,
speaking silence shows us that sounds or marks do not con¬
stitute the essence of language. Nor is this silence merely
a gap in our chatter; it is, rather, the primordial attune-
ment of one existent to another, out of which all language
—as sounds, marks, and counters—comes. It is only because
man is capable of such silence that he is capable of authen¬
tic speech. If he ceases to be rooted in that silence all his
talk becomes chatter.

This is an approach to language very different from that
of the various forms of semanticism now in vogue in this
country and in England. Where the semanticists deal with
words as signs or counters, and sometimes systems of such
signs as logical calculi, Heidegger points rather to the
existential background out of which those signs emerge.
The semanticist I. A. Richards once presented a theory of
poetry in which the poet became a manipulator of verbal
signs—a sort of emotional engineer. But all semantical in¬
terpretations of language, however useful they may be, are
doomed at the start to be incomplete because they do not
get at the roots of language in human existence. Take
Richards’ series of books, Basic English, Basic German, etc.,
which attempt through pictures and words to instruct the
pupil in a language he knows nothing of: On the first page
of the Basic English text I find a picture (supposed to be
of a man) pointing to himself and saying, “I am a man,”

224

IBBATIONAL MAN

and another of a woman and a child declaring what they
are. Suppose I knew no English altogether and picked up
the book; I might very well think “I am a man” meant “I
am a male ballet dancer,” for that is what the man in the
little abstract drawing looks like. The point may appear
frivolous, but it is not. Such misunderstandings are avoided
only because there is an unexpressed context of mutual un¬
derstanding within which the instructor and pupil in the
language communicate. Such a context of understanding is
not expressed because all expression takes place within it.
The instructor may lengthen his preamble to the linguistic
manual, in the hope of e limin ating such misunderstandings,
but at whatever point he begins there must be, behind and
around his words, this context of mutual understanding.

In what does this unexpressed context of understanding
consist? As we have seen above, in the understanding in
which our existence itself is rooted. We have spoken earlier
of Heidegger’s Field Theory of Being; we might just as well
call it a contextual theory of Being. Being is the context
in which all beings come to light—and this means those
beings as well that are sounds or marks on paper. Because
man stands in this context, this open space of Being, he
may communicate with other men. Men exist “within
language” prior to their uttering sounds because they exist
within a mutual context of understanding, which in the end
is nothing but Being itself.

It is a pity that Heidegger’s view of language has not
become known in this country. It might have spared us
many fruitless and self-defeating forays in literary criticism,
in which the effort has been to pick poems apart into the
words that make them up. And it might illuminate discus¬
sions by our logicians of formalized languages and logics,
by pointing out that every attempt at formalization must
presuppose a context of language within which understand¬
ing is already taking place.

HEIDEGGER

225

3. DEATH, ANXIETY, FINITUDE

Men die. This happens every day in the world. Death is
a public event in the world, of which we take notice in
obituaries; we pay the necessary social obsequies and are
sometimes deeply touched emotionally. But so long as
death remains a fact outside ourselves, we have not yet
passed from the proposition "Men die” to the proposition
“I am to die.” The realization of the latter brings with it
the shattering experience of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich.

Heidegger’s analysis of death—one of the most powerful
and celebrated passages in Being and Time —reveals in
thought the truth that the artist Tolstoy had revealed in his
story. (Truth in both cases has to be understood basically
as revelation.) The authentic meaning of death—“I am to
die”—is not as an external and public fact within the world,
but as an internal possibility of my own Being. Nor is it a
possibility like a point at the end of a road, which I will in
time reach. So long as I think in this way, I still hold death
at a distance outside myself. The point is that I may die at
any moment, and therefore death is my possibility now. It
is like a precipice at my feet. It is also the most extreme
and absolute of my possibilities: extreme, because it is the
possibility of not being and hence cuts off all other possibili¬
ties; absolute, because man can surmount all other heart¬
breaks, even the deaths of those he loves, but his own death
puts an end to him. Hence, death is the most personal and
intimate of possibilities, since it is what I must suffer for
myself: nobody else can die for me.

Only by taking my death into myself, according to
Heidegger, does an authentic existence become possible for
me. Touched by this interior angel of death, I cease to be
the impersonal and social One among many, as Ivan Ilyich
was, and I am free to become myself. Though terrifying,
the taking of death into ourselves is also liberating: It frees
us from servitude to the petty cares that threaten to engulf
our daily life and thereby opens us to the essential projects
by which we can make our lives personally and significantly

226

IRRATIONAL MAN

our own. Heidegger calls this the condition of “freedom-
toward-death” or “resoluteness.”

The acceptance of death, as possible here and now, dis¬
closes the radical finitude of our existence. More than any
philosopher before him—more even than Kant, from whom
he derived a good deal in this respect—Heidegger has ex¬
plored the depths of human finitude. We tend to think of
finitude principally in connection with physical objects: ob¬
jects are finite because they are contained within definite
spatial boundaries. They extend so far and no farther. The
essential finitude of man, however, is experienced not at his
boundaries but, so to speak, at the very center of his Being.
He is finite because his Being is penetrated by non-Being.
At first glance, this looks utterly paradoxical; and our rea¬
son, basing itself rigidly upon the law of contradiction, can¬
not comprehend it. But we ourselves, as existing beings,
comprehend it all too well when we are plunged into the
mood of anxiety, when the void of non-Being opens up
within our own Being.

Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite
object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing
at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present
and felt as the object of our dread. The first time this fun¬
damental human experience was described was by Kierke¬
gaard in his Concept of Dread, but there it was done only
briefly, in passing; Heidegger has greatly expanded and
deepened Kierkegaard’s insight. Significantly enough, the
dread described by Kierkegaard was in connection with the
theological problem of Original Sin, the sin that comes
down to all human beings from the first sin of Adam. Be¬
fore Adam chose to bite the apple, Kierkegaard says, there
opened in him a yawning abyss; he saw the possibility of
his own freedom in the committing of a future act against
the background of Nothingness. This Nothingness is at once
fascinating and dreadful. In Heidegger Nothingness is a
presence within our own Being, always there, in the inner
quaking that goes on beneath the calm surface of our pre¬
occupation with things. Anxiety before Nothingness has
many modalities and guises: now trembling and creative,

HEIDEGGER 227

now panicky and destructive; but always it is as inseparable
from ourselves as our own breathing because anxiety is our
existence itself in its radical insecurity. In anxiety we both
are and are not, at one and the same time, and this is our
dread. Our finitude is such that positive and negative inter¬
penetrate our whole existence.

That man is finite is not merely a psychological charac¬
teristic of him personally or his species. Nor is he finite
merely because his number of allotted years on this earth is
limited. He is finite because the “not”—negation—penetrates
the very core of his existence. And whence is this “not” de¬
rived? From Being itself. Man is finite because he lives and
mows within a finite understanding of Being. This means,
among other things, that human truth too is always pene¬
trated by untruth. And here we have gone as far as possible
from Hegel and the philosophers of the Enlightenment,
who had hoped to enclose all truth in a system.

4. TIME AND TEMPORALITY;

HISTORY

Our finitude discloses itself essentially in time. In ex¬
isting, to take the word etymologically, we stand outside
ourselves at once open to Being and in the open clearing of
Being; and this happens temporally as well as spatially.
Man, Heidegger says, is a creature of distance; he is per¬
petually beyond himself, his existence at every moment
opening out toward the future. The future is the not-yet,
and the past is the no-longer; and these two negatives—the
not-yet and the no-longer—penetrate his existence. They are
his finitude in its temporal manifestation.

We really know time, says Heidegger, because we know
we are going to die. Widiout this passionate realization of
our mortality, time would be simply a movement of the
clock that we watch passively, calculating its advance—a
movement devoid of human meaning. Man is not, strictly
speaking, in time as a body is immersed in a river that
rushes by. Rather, time is in him; his existence is temporal
through and through, from the inside out. His moods, his

228

IRRATIONAL MAN

care and concern, his anxiety, guilt, and conscience—all are
saturated with time. Everything that makes up human ex¬
istence has to be understood in the light of man’s temporal¬
ity: of the not-yet, the no-longer, the here-and-now.

These three tenses of time—future, past, and present—
Heidegger calls ekstasies, in the literal sense of the Greek
ek-stasis, a standing outside and beyond oneself. Philoso¬
phers before Heidegger had constructed time as a series of
“nows”—present moments—following each other like points
upon a line. This is what we call clock time—time as meas¬
ured by chronometers and calendars. But in order to con¬
struct time as a sequence of “nows” we have to be able,
Heidegger says, to understand what “now” means; and to
do this we have to understand it as the moment dividing
past and future—that is, we have to understand past and
future together in order to understand the present. Hence,
every attempt to interpret time as a sequence of present mo¬
ments, sliding away into the past, presupposes that man al¬
ready stands beyond himself in one of the three ek-stases
of time. His existence is thus a field spread out over time
as it is over space; his temporality is a basic fact of this
existence, one that underlies all his chronometrical meas¬
urements of time. Clocks are useful to man only because
his existence is rooted in a prior kind of temporality.

Heidegger’s theory of time is novel, in that, unlike earlier
philosophers with their “nows,” he gives priority to the fu¬
ture tense. The future, according to him, is primary because
it is the region toward which man projects and in which he
defines his own being. “Man never is, but always is to be,”
to alter slightly the famous line of Pope. Man looks ever
forward, toward the open region of the future, and in so
looking he takes upon himself the burden of the past (or
of what out of the past he selects as his inheritance) and
thereby orients himself in a certain way to his present and
actual situation in life.

Here time reveals itself for Heidegger as being essentially
historical. We are not bom at some moment in general, but
at that particular moment in that particular milieu and in
entering the world we also enter, however humbly, into its

HEIDEGGER

22Q

historical destiny. The more concretely and humanly we
grasp the temporal roots of human existence, the more
clearly we see that this existence is in and of itself, through
and through, historical. As temporality is to time, so is his¬
toricity to history; as we make clocks to measure time be¬
cause our being is essentially temporal, so man writes histo¬
ries or makes history by his actions because his very being is
historical. Heidegger here corrects the historicism of think¬
ers like Hegel or Marx, to whom man is an historical crea¬
ture because he takes part in the vast historical process of
the world. World history, for Hegel and Marx, is like a
mighty river that carries individuals and nations in its flow.
But this meaning of history, says Heidegger, really derives
from the more basic sense in which man is temporal simply
through being a creature whose very existence stands tem¬
porally open. Man is an historical creature, true; but not
merely because he wears such-and-such clothes at a given
period, has such-and-such “historical” customs, or is deci¬
sively shaped by the class conflicts of his time. All these
things derive their significance from a more basic fact:
namely, that man is the being who, however dimly and half-
consciously, always understands, and must understand, his
own being historically.

And a thinker like Heidegger? He too—and indeed he
more than all men, if his thought is to be rooted and not
rootless—has to understand himself historically. He has to
see his own thought as an historical undertaking, an act
that projects a certain future and scrupulously relates itself
to the whole tradition in which his thinking takes place.
More than any other contemporary thinker Heidegger seeks
to relate his thought to the history of Western thought and
not in an external and merely scholarly sense, but as an
event transpiring within that history. Therein his thinking
shows itself to be more essentially historical than the
thought of any formal historian of philosophy. The final
summation of his philosophy has in fact to be given now in
terms of the perspective in which it places the whole history

230

IRRATIONAL MAN

of Western thought—and more than thought, the history of
the very Being of the West.

This perspective is outlined for us most sharply in two
brief but extremely significant essays, Plato’s Theory of
Truth (1942) and On the Nature of Truth (1943), and
especially in the first of these. Here we come back inevitably
to the problem of truth, for that is central to Heidegger’s
philosophy, as neither time, history, care, anxiety, death,
nor any of the other dramatic matters that have caught the
attention of critics are. The decision about truth is crucial
for Heidegger because it is the decision about the meaning
of Being, and hence the pivot on which the history of men
and of whole civilizations turns.

The history of Being (for the West), Heidegger says, be¬
gins with the fall of Being. In this respect, his view is paral¬
lel with the Biblical view which takes Adam’s fall to be the
beginning of all human history. The fall of Being, for Hei¬
degger, occurred when the Greek thinkers detached things
as clear and distinct forms from their encompassing back¬
ground, in order that they might reckon clearly with them.
The terms used in Gestalt psychology—figure and ground-
may be helpful here: By detaching the figure from the
ground the object could be made to emerge into the day-
fight of human consciousness; but the sense of the ground,
the environing background, could also be lost. The figure
comes into sharper focus, that is, but the ground recedes,
becomes invisible, is forgotten. The Greeks detached beings
from the vast environing ground of Being. This act of de¬
tachment was accompanied by a momentous shift in the
meaning of truth for the Greeks, a shift which Heidegger
pinpoints as taking place in a single passage in Plato’s Re¬
public, the celebrated allegory of the cave. The quality of
a-letheia, un-hiddenness, had been considered the mark of
truth; but with Plato in that passage truth came to be de¬
fined, rather, as the correctness of an intellectual judgment.
Truth henceforth resided in the human intellect insofar as
that intellect judged truly about things. By adopting this
meaning of truth as the primary and essential one, the

HEIDEGGER

231

Greeks were able to develop science, the unique and dis¬
tinguishing characteristic of Western civilization.

None of the Oriental civilizations had effected a simi¬
lar detachment of beings from Being. Though Heidegger
makes no reference to these Oriental civilizations—he always
takes his data from the West, even while trying to think
beyond it—we, in placing his thought, cannot fail to refer
to them. In neither India nor China, nor in the philosophies
that these civilizations produced, was truth located in the
intellect. On the contrary, the Indian and Chinese sages in¬
sisted on the very opposite: namely, that man does not at¬
tain to truth so long as he remains locked up in his intellect;
a man who located his truth in the mind would have struck
these sages not merely as mistaken, but as a human psy¬
chological aberration. The great historical parting of the
ways between Western and Eastern man came about be¬
cause each made a different decision as to what truth is.

(This should not be interpreted, however—as some of our
more glib Orientalizers do interpret it—in any superficial
sense as an error into which the West strayed, one which
might have been corrected by the exercise of a little more
wisdom. History has to be seen as somewhat more fateful
than that. The project—to use the word in Heidegger’s sense
—of the Greeks of defining truth in a certain way was essen¬
tially finite like all human projects, and therefore carried
within itself its own negative. We cannot define ourselves
without negating the alternatives that we do not become. If
the Greeks had not detached objects from their enveloping
ground of Being, what we know as the Western intellect
would not have come into existence. The lack of this intel¬
lect is the negative, the shadow, in the historical project of
the Oriental civilizations. Every light has its shadow.)

The Greeks, however, did not themselves become subjec¬
tivists in the modem sense. They philosophized in the
market place, in the open air, and they were still close
enough to Being, which their thinking had just begun to
forget. It remained for modem science, at the beginning of
our epoch, to effect a sharper division between man and
nature; and the thought of Descartes is the expression of

232

IRRATIONAL MAN

this cleavage. The object which has been detached from
the enveloping ground of Being can be measured and cal¬
culated, but the essence of this object—the thing-in-itself—
becomes more and more remote from man. The subject be¬
comes conscious of himself as cut off from the object even
as his power to manipulate the object mounts almost un¬
believably. The word “object” is itself instructive here: it
is from the Latin ob-jectum, that which is thrown or put
before—hence, an obstacle that has to be conquered, ma¬
nipulated, transformed. Man masters beings, but Being—the
open region in which both subject and object stand out and
are thus not divided—is forgotten. There is left to man noth¬
ing but his Will to Power over objects; and Heidegger is
right when he says that Nietzsche is in this respect the cul¬
mination of Western metaphysics, which metaphysics in
turn culminates in the situation of the world today where
power rides supreme.

Heidegger here is talking about one of the most pervasive
attitudes in the world today, one which shows itself in our
fantastic passion for the organization of life in every area.
The businessman who flies to the country for a week-end,
is whisked oS to golf, tennis, sailing, entertains his guests
successfully, all on split-second schedule, and at the end of
the week-end flies back to the city, but without once having
had the occasion or the desire to lose himself walking down
a country lane—such a man, we say, is marvelously organ¬
ized and really knows how to manage things. And, to be
sure, he does show an admirable mastery over things; over
beings but not Being, with which he never comes in contact.
To lose oneself walking down a country lane is, literally, to
lose the self that is split off from nature: to enter the region
of Being where subject and object no longer confront each
other in murderous division. The relation of the poet to Be¬
ing is not the relation of the busy man of power to beings.
The latter goes to the country and returns, but without ever
really being there. The man of today, technological man,
is the final descendant of Cartesian man, but without Des¬
cartes’ passion for clear and distinct ideas. As Descartes,
locked up in his own luminous ego, confronted a world of

HEIDEGGER

233

material objects as thoroughly alien and perhaps unknow¬
able, so technological man faces the objects in his world
with no need or capacity for intimacy with them beyond
the knowledge of what button has to be pressed in order
to control their working.

And it should also be clear by now what Heidegger’s
final answer to Nietzsche is: it is that Western man has got
to fetch Being back from the oblivion into which it has
fallen. Man must learn to let Being be, instead of twisting
and dislocating it to make it yield up answers to our need
for power. A simple example of such twisting occurs in the
case of art. Nietzsche, in his compulsion to erect a system,
had included even the artist under the Will to Power: Art
is the discharge of the artist’s vitality and power, he said,
and the experience of great art in turn enhances this vitality
and power in us. Andre Malraux in his long essay on the
psychology and history of art, The Voices of Silence, has
given recently the most eloquent expression to this Nie-
tzschean position. Malraux’s book abounds in metaphors of
struggle, conquest, victory; the world’s art is seen as an im¬
aginary museum of images that represents, in perfect Nie-
tzschean style, man’s victory over Nothingness. Malraux, a
supremely typical figure of the nervousness of our times, is
consumed by the Niet^schean demon of the Will to Power.
But do all of his military metaphors show us the other side
of art? Do they convey to us that the artist, as well as the
spectator, must submit patiently and passively to the artis¬
tic process, that he must lie in wait for the image to produce
itself; that he produces false notes as soon as he tries to
force anything; that, in short, he must let the truth of his
art happen to him? All of these points are part of what
Heidegger means by our letting Being be. Letting it be,
the artist lets it speak to him and through him; and so too
the thinker must let it be thought.

In thus counseling passivity as against activity—the words
are not too precise, but they will do for the moment—Hei¬
degger seems to be directing us once more toward the
Orient. When he repeats over and over that the tradition
of the West begins with the forgetting of Being, that this

234

IRRATIONAL MAN

tradition has come to its completion in a dead end, and
that we have now in our thinking to go beyond it to the
source from which it sprang, one is forced to think of the
other great civilization of mankind that arose in the East.
Certainly, there are distinct points of correspondence be¬
tween Heidegger’s thought and that of the East. Western
metaphysics, before Heidegger, had never thought out the
nature of non-Being, but Buddhist metaphysics had; and
Chinese Taoism accepts cheerfully the necessary comple¬
mentarity of Being and non-Being, where the Western mind
recoils from this with its scandalized cry of “nihilism.” Says
Lao-tse:

Thirty spokes unite in one nave,

And because of the part where nothing exists we have
the use of a carriage wheel.

Clay is molded into vessels,

And because of the space where nothing exists we are able
to use them as vessels.

Doors and windows are cut out in the walls of a house,
And because they are empty spaces, we are able to use
them.

Therefore, on the one hand we have the benefit of existence,
and on the other of non-existence.

I even venture to think that the nearest thing to Heidegger’s
notion of Being that we find in the past may be the Tao
of Chinese philosophy. But such suggestions prove nothing,
for Heidegger, as we have seen, stays resolutely within fhe
tradition of the West while thinking beyond it. He is proba¬
bly right to do so. Aside from the difficulty of the Eastern
languages—and Heidegger proves abundantly that we can¬
not understand Greek or Latin philosophy apart from the
words in which they were uttered—we cannot even be sure
that we understand the experience out of which Eastern
philosophies grew: it is still too remote from us. If Western
thought moves beyond its present impasse, it may very well
be through orientalizing itself, but what results will be
something very different from anything the Orient knew.

HEIDEGGER

235

“But what is Being?” I imagine the reader asking in per¬
plexity, now that I have given at least the outlines of Hei¬
degger’s thought. “We still haven’t been told about that.”
We like the compact formulae that tell us clearly what a
thing is. A triangle is a plane figure bounded by three
straight lines—well then, we know what a triangle is. We
want a concept to go by, and a concept is a representation,
or picture, of the thing. But Being, unlike a triangle, is
something of which we can have no mental picture or rep¬
resentation. We reach it by a kind of thought other than
conceptual reason. “Think” and “thank” are kindred roots,
and the German word an-denken— literally, “to think on”—
means to remember; hence, for Heidegger, think, thank,
and remember are kindred notions. Real thinking, thinking
that is rooted in Being, is at once an act of thanking and
remembrance. When a dear friend says, in parting, “Think
of mel” this does not mean “Have a mental picture of mel”
but: “Let me (even in my absence) be present with you.”
So too we must think of Being by letting it be present to
us even though we can have no mental picture of it. Being
is indeed just this presence, invisible and all-pervasive,
which cannot be enclosed in any mental concept. To think
it is to thank it, to remember it with gratitude, for our hu¬
man existence is ultimately rooted in it. And if, just because
we cannot represent it in any mental concept, we choose to
forget it, then all our human and humanistic enterprises are
threatened with the void, since our existence itself would
thereby be tom from its root.

Heidegger has not told us in so many words what Being
is; but anyone who has read his text through has from it a
concrete sense of Being quite different from anything that
our philosophic tradition has so far brought to light. One
has, from a book like Being and Time, a sense of man as a
creature transparent and open to Being in every nerve and
fiber of his life; and this perhaps is as clear a sense of Being,
the unutterable, as any thinker in the West has yet given
us. Indeed, that book is so charged and compact, in its
analysis of human existence, that the few points from it
cited above hardly suffice to give more than a sketchy idea

236

IRRATIONAL MAN

of its real range and depth. In the years when Heidegger
was writing it, during the early 1920’s when he was a young
professor at Marburg, he was thinking at white heat—think¬
ing for a whole lifetime, it would seem, for the rest of his
writings are largely elucidation of this monumental book.

The most frequent criticism of Heideggerian man is that
he is a creature of solitude rather than community, that his
authentic existence is secured in relation to himself alone
and not essentially to others. This criticism has been made
by Existentialists like Jaspers, Buber, Berdyaev, Marcel—
and in a somewhat different form, by Sartre too. Buber’s
criticism (in Between Man and Man) is the most forcefully
put and, because Buber is enjoying something of a vogue
now in the United States, is likely to be the most influential
here. His criticism entirely misses the point, however, that
Heideggerian man—or the authentic Heideggerian man—is
related not merely to himself but to Being, and that only
in virtue of the latter can this creature attain authenticity.
Buber, the religious humanist, does not really see that Hei¬
degger is concerned with Being and so is not constructing
a philosophical anthropology. Man is for Heidegger merely
a means of access, a gateway to the problem of Being; and
such a project of thought is not likely to do justice to all
the concrete facets of man’s existence, psychological and
social. Heidegger does not philosophize humanly (he calls
it existentiefly) as do Jaspers and Buber, who are rather
like lyricists of existence, seeking to awaken authentic exist¬
ence in their hearers. Heidegger is a thinker, no more and
no less; and the project that is his life is an austere and
somber meditation upon Being.

Still, although formally speaking Buber’s objections are
beside the point, this old rabbi has wonderful instincts and
he has sniffed out where the trouble really lies: namely in
that obscure region where the thinker and the man meet
and are one. Heidegger seeks only to be a thinker; and as
such, he towers above men like Jaspers and Buber: to put
it in blunt American, as thinkers they are not even in the
same league with Heidegger. But being a thinker (even in

HEIDEGGER

237

the exalted sense in which Heidegger is one) is not enough
for being a man. If thinking could give us back our roots,
Heidegger’s thought would do that, since no thinker has
ever been so rooted in the everyday; but it clearly does not.
He has led us back, as has no other thinker, to see what is
involved in light and vision, but we need to go one step
farther and see that all light requires fire. After Heidegger,
we feel the need of a new Kierkegaard to pump back liv¬
ing blood into the ontological skeleton of the Heideggerian
Dasein.

Kierkegaard as against Heidegger—that is the essential
opposition to which criticism like Buber’s returns us. And
the opposition turns, as Heidegger would wish it to, on the
two men’s varying notions of truth: it lying for Kierkegaard
in the ethical and religious passion of the individual, for
Heidegger in Being itself, as the open region in which sub¬
ject and object can be and therefore can meet, and without
which there could be neither subject nor object. These two
notions of truth have not yet been reconciled by existential
philosophy—that is a task for the future. But must not the
quest for Being, as the Orient held, be one and the same
with the individual’s burning thirst for personal salvation?
Is not thinking itself incomplete until it unites these—or,
rather, ceases to divide them? Does not the Greek word for
truth, a-letheia, of which Heidegger makes so much, derive
after all from the more concrete adjective, alethes— mean¬
ing, as applied to the individual, a man who is true, open,
sincere? Truth comes to be, in short, only with the man
who is true.

Heidegger is far closer in spirit to Nietzsche than he is to
Kierkegaard; and his thinking, though much more in con¬
trol, breathes the icy superhuman air of solitude of Zara-
thustra. It is no accident that Heidegger finds such an af¬
finity with Holderlin—the great poet of a loneliness so
intense that he too, like Nietzsche, drifted off into schizo¬
phrenia. Heidegger acquiesces too calmly in the “death of
God.” If he has really experienced it, we feel, then his
thought should be more tormented—or, on the other hand,
more cheerful, since he has survived that death. Holderlin

IRRATIONAL MAN

238

and Nietzsche were the great poets of this death of God;
Heidegger has not succumbed to their dire fate—perhaps
because he is not a poet, as Kierkegaard might have put
it, but only a professor.

Nevertheless, German professors are marvelous beings.
Over a century ago there was a German professor named
Hegel whose thought might have looked to an ordinary ob¬
server like the veriest academic woolgathering, of no in¬
terest to anyone except other professional woolgatherers.
And yet, Hegel’s thought went far and wide outside the
walls of the Academy and in the end begot Marx and Com¬
munism. Heidegger may prove equally influential. Already
he is recasting our whole perspective on Western history;
the history textbooks of the future may be built on his ideas
of historicity, as in the last few generations they were built
on Hegel’s. And Finitism is already beginning to triumph
in modem mathematics. In bringing non-Being, or Noth¬
ingness, into thought, Heidegger points up the possibility
that the West may at long last face the problem of nihilism
without either scandalized rhetoric or complacent self-
deception. And his thought has already touched the world
outside the Academy, since through Sartre he was the prime
mover in French Existentialism. Although in this case, as
we shall see, the child did not remain very true to its parent.

SARTRE

Chapter Ten

We m a y as well begin with Sartre in a moment of hero¬
ism. Much in his writings is distinctly unheroic in nature,
but the note of heroism does sound, and here it is in The
Republic of Silence, where Sartre is describing the life of
the French Resistance from 1940 to 1945:

We were never more free than during the German oc¬
cupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the
right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces
and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or an¬
other, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were
deported en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the
newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting
and insipid picture of ourselves that our suppressors
wanted us to accept. And because of all this we were
free. Because the Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts,
every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-
powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, ev¬
ery word took on the value of a declaration of principles.
Because we were hunted down, every one of our gestures
had the weight of a solemn commitment. . . .

Exile, captivity, and especially death (which we usu¬
ally shrink from facing at all in happier days) became
for us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned
that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even con¬
stant and inevitable dangers, but they must be considered
as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our

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240

reality as men. At every instant we lived up to the full
sense of this commonplace little phrase: “Man is mortall”
And the choice that each of us made of his life was an
authentic choice because it was made face to face with
death, because it could always have been expressed in
these terms: “Rather death than . . .” And here I am not
speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants,
but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and
day throughout four years, answered No.

And a few years later (1947), in his What is Literature?
he draws another philosophic conclusion from this expe¬
rience:

We have been taught to take Evil seriously. It is nei¬
ther our fault nor our merit if we lived in a time when
torture was a daily fact. Chateaubriand, Oradour, the
Rue des Saussaies, Dachau, and Auschwitz have all dem¬
onstrated to us that Evil is not an appearance, that know¬
ing its cause does not dispel it, that it is not opposed to
Good as a confused idea is to a clear one, that it is not
the effect of passions which might be cured, of a fear
which might be overcome, of a passing aberration which
might be excused, of an ignorance which might be en¬
lightened, that it can in no way be diverted, brought
back, reduced, and incorporated into idealistic human¬
ism, like that shade of which Leibnitz has written that
it is necessary for the glare of daylight. . . .

Perhaps a day will come when a happy age, looking
back at the past, will see in this suffering and shame one
of the paths which led to peace. But we are not on the
side of history already made. We were, as I have said,
situated in such a way that every lived minute seemed
to us like something irreducible. Therefore, in spite of
ourselves, we came to this conclusion, which will seem
shocking to lofty souls: Evil cannot be redeemed.

It is necessary to emphasize passages like these for Amer¬
ican readers who wish to understand Sartre, because Amer¬
icans have not yet comprehended what the French have

SABTHE

241

lived through: that we have at last arrived at “the age of
assassins” which the poet Rimbaud predicted. Sartre came
to maturity during the 1930s. The atmosphere of Leftist
politics was over everything, and Sartre has never ceased
politically to be on the Left. But over France also was the
stale and tired atmosphere of a world already doomed to
defeat: The Popular Front government of L 4 on Blum
drifted, nerveless and flaccid, incapable of meeting the crisis
of the times; the French bourgeoisie hung on, entrenched
and petty, unable even to conceive the possibility of any
great action. “Les salattds” became a potent term for Sartre
in those days—the salauds, the stinkers, the stuffy and self-
righteous people congealed in the insincerity of their virtues
and vices. This atmosphere of decay breathes through
Sartre’s first novel, 'Nausea, and it is no accident that the
quotation on the flyleaf is from Celine, the poet of the abyss,
of the nihilism and disgust of that period. The nausea in
Sartre’s book is the nausea of existence itself; and to those
who are ready to use this as an excuse for tossing out the
whole of Sartrian philosophy, we may point out that it is
better to encounter one’s existence in disgust than never to
encounter it at all—as the salaud in his academic or bour¬
geois or party-leader strait jacket never does. The Resist¬
ance came to Sartre and his generation as a release from
disgust into heroism. It was a call to action, an action that
brought men to the very limits of their being, and in hear¬
ing this call man himself was not found wanting. He could
even rediscover his own irreducible liberty in saying No to
the overpowering might of the occupying forces.

The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom
that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. This is the
basic premise in Sartre’s view of human freedom: freedom
is in its very essence negative, though this negativity is also
creative. At a certain moment, perhaps, the drug or the pain
inflicted by the torturer may make the victim lose conscious¬
ness, and he will confess. But so long as he retains the
lucidity of consciousness, however tiny the area of action
possible for him, he can still say in his own mind: No. Con¬
sciousness and freedom are thus given together. Only if

2 42 , IRRATIONAL MAN

consciousness is blotted out can man be deprived of this
residual freedom. Where all the avenues of action are
blocked for a man, this freedom may seem a tiny and un¬
important thing; but it is in fact total and absolute, and
Sartre is right to insist upon it as such, for it affords man
his final dignity, that of being man.

The experience of this freedom is not so new in philoso¬
phy as it might seem. It is this kind of freedom, in fact,
that accompanied Descartes throughout the course of his
famous Systematic Doubt, in which he proposed to say No
to every belief, no matter how plausible, so long as he saw
a possibility of doubting it. For the young and brilliant
Sartre, teaching philosophy before the Second World War,
Descartes was a special hero—a hero of thought if not of the
life of action. The experience of the Resistance gave the
figure of Descartes even greater importance for Sartre, since
in the Resistance Cartesianism could be incarnated in the
life of action. As Descartes proposed to say No to that im¬
aginary demon who might seduce him into assenting to a
proposition that was not altogether clear and indubitable,
though everything in society and nature around him also
urged him to assent, so the Resistant could say No to the
might of the Occupation.

Sartre is a Cartesian who has read Proust and Heidegger,
and whose psychological explorations of man go far beyond
those of the seventeenth-century philosopher; more impor¬
tant still, he is a Cartesian who has experienced war and
terror in the modem world and who is therefore situated
historically in an altogether different relation to the world.
But a Cartesian he is, nonetheless, as perhaps no French¬
man—or no French thinker—can help being when the chips
are really down. Descartes and the French Resistance—
Descartes in the French Resistance—these are the simple
keys to the whole of Sartre’s apparently complicated and
involved philosophy.

To see this clearly we need only go back to Descartes at
a certain moment in his Systematic Doubt. He proposes to
reject all beliefs so long as they can in any way be doubted,
to resist all temptations to say Yes until his understanding

SARTRE

243

is convinced according to its own light; so he rejects belief
in the existence of an external world, of minds other than
his own, of his own body, of his memories and sensations.
What he cannot doubt is his own consciousness, for to
doubt is to be conscious, and therefore by doubting its ex¬
istence he would affirm it. In the dark void in which Des¬
cartes hovered there shone only the fight of his own mind.
But before this certitude shone for him (and even after it,
before he passed on to other truths), he was a nothingness,
a negativity, existing outside of nature and history, for he
had temporarily abolished all belief in a world of bodies
and memories. Thus man cannot be interpreted, Sartre says,
as a solid substantial thing existing amid the plenitude of
things that make up a world; he is beyond nature because
in his negative capability he transcends it. Man’s freedom
is to say No, and this means that he is the being by whom
nothingness comes into being. He is able to suspend all of
nature and history in doubt, to bracket it against the back¬
drop of nothingness before which the Cartesian doubter
hovers. Sartre here merely draws conclusions from what is
existentially implicit in the Cartesian doubt.

Descartes, of course, was a good Christian and a Catho¬
lic, and as a practical matter he had no intention of im¬
periling his immortal soul by placing his religious faith in
doubt while he was performing his intellectual gyrations
in the void. As a canny and sagacious Frenchman, he pro¬
posed to abide by the customs of his time and place (which
included the practice of religion). Hence, when he launched
himself into the Doubt, he made certain of securing his
lines of communication behind him; he took no chances
when he made the descent into the painful night of the
void. The next step after the certitude of the Cogito, the
“I think,” thus turns out to be a proof of the existence of
God; and with God as guarantee the whole world of na¬
ture, the multitude of things with their fixed nature or es¬
sences that the mind may now know, is re-established
around Descartes. Sartre, however, is the Cartesian doubter
at a different place and time: God is dead, and no longer
guarantees to this passionate and principled atheist that

244

IRRATIONAL MAN

vast structure of essences, the world, to which his freedom
must give assent. As a modem man, Sartre remains in that
anguish of nothingness in which Descartes floated before
the miraculous light of God shone to lead him out of it.
For Sartre there is no unalterable structure of essences or
values given prior to man’s own existence. That existence
has meaning, finally, only as the liberty to say No, and by
saying No to create a world. If we remove God from the
picture, the liberty which reveals itself in the Cartesian
doubt is total and absolute; but thereby also the more an¬
guished, and this anguish is the irreducible destiny and dig¬
nity of man. Here Cartesianism has become more heroic—
and more demoniacal.

Thus Sartre ends by allotting to man the kind of freedom
that Descartes has ascribed only to God. It is, he says, the
freedom Descartes secretly would have given to man had
he not been limited by the theological convictions of his
time and place. Descartes’ God derives from the absolutely
free God of Duns Scotus rather than from the God of St.
Thomas Aquinas, who is bound by the laws of logic. This
Cartesian God, says Sartre, is the freest God that man ever
invented. He is not subordinate to a realm of essences:
rather, He creates essences and causes them to be what
they are. Hence such a God transcends the laws of logic
and mathematics. As His existence precedes all essences, so
man’s existence precedes his essence; he exists, and out of
the free project which his existence can be he makes him¬
self what he is. When God dies, man takes the place of
God. Such had been the prophecy of Dostoevski and Nietz¬
sche, and Sartre on this point is their heir. The difference,
however, is that Dostoevski and Nietzsche were frenzied
prophets, whereas Sartre advances his view with all the
lucidity of Cartesian reason and advances it, moreover, as
a basis for humanitarian and democratic social action. To
put man in the place of God may seem, to traditionalists,
an unspeakable piece of diabolism; but in Sartre’s case it is
done by a thinker who, to judge from his writings, is a man
of overwhelming good will and generosity.

SARTRE

245

1 . BEING-FOR-ITSELF AND
BEING-IN-ITSELF

Sartre’s philosophy is based on a dualism which, if not
Cartesian to the letter, is certainly Cartesian in spirit. Be¬
ing, says Sartre, is divided into two fundamental kinds: (1)
Being-in-itself and (2) Being-for-itself. Being-in-itself (Sar¬
tre’s en-soi) is the self-contained being of a thing. A stone
is a stone; it is what it is; and in being just what it is, no
more and no less, the being of the thing always coincides
with itself. Being-for-itself ( pour-soi) is coextensive with
the realm of consciousness, and the nature of consciousness
is that it is perpetually beyond itself. Our thought goes be¬
yond itself, toward tomorrow or yesterday, and toward the
outer edges of the world. Human existence is thus a per¬
petual self-transcendence: in existing we are always beyond
ourselves. Consequently we never possess our being as we
possess a thing. Our existence from moment to moment is a
perpetual flying beyond ourselves, or else a perpetual fall¬
ing behind our own possibilities; in any case, our being
never exactly coincides with itself. It could do so only if we
sank into the self-contained form of the being of a thing,
and this would be possible only if we ceased to be conscious.

This notion of the For-itself may seem obscure, but we
encounter it on the most ordinary occasions. I have been to
a party; I come away, and with a momentary pang of sad¬
ness I say, “I am not myself.” It is necessary to take this
proposition quite literally as something that only man can
say of himself, because only man can say it to himself. I
have the feeling of coming to myself after having lost or
mislaid my being momentarily in a social encounter that
estranged me from myself. This is the first and immediate
level on which the term yields its meaning. But the next
and deeper level of meaning occurs when the feeling of sad¬
ness leads me to think in a spirit of self-reproach that I am
not myself in a still more fundamental sense: I have not
realized so many of the plans or projects that make up my
being; I am not myself because I do not measure up to

IRRATIONAL MAN

246

myself. Beneath this level too there is still another and
deeper meaning, rooted in the very nature of my being: I
am not myself, and I can never be myself, because my being
stretching out beyond itself at any given moment exceeds
itself. I am always simultaneously more and less than I am.

Herein lies the fundamental uneasiness, or anxiety, of the
human condition, for Sartre. Because we are perpetually
flitting beyond ourselves, or falling behind our possibilities,
we seek to ground our existence, to make it more secure.
In seeking for security we seek to give our existence the
self-contained being of a thing. The For-itself struggles to
become the In-itself, to attain the rocldike and unshakable
solidity of a thing. But this it can never do so long as it is
conscious and alive. Man is doomed to the radical inse¬
curity and contingency of his being; for without it he would
not be man but merely a thing and would not have the
human capacity for transcendence of his given situation.
There is a curious dialectical interplay here: that which
constitutes man’s power and glory, that which lies at the
very heart of his power to be lord over things, namely his
capacity to transcend himself and his immediate situation,
is at one and the same time that which causes the fragility,
the wavering and flight, the anguish of our human lot.

With enormous ingenuity and virtuosity Sartre inter¬
weaves these two notions—Being-in-itself and Being-for-
itself—to elucidate the complexities of human psychology.
The principal work in which he does this is L’&tre et le
neant (Being and Nothingness ), a great, uneven, brilliant
and verbose tome which he worked on during the Resist¬
ance and which appeared in 1944. Sartre’s debt to Heideg¬
ger is great, but his own originality is unquestionable. He
is one of the most brilliant minds alive—sometimes we feel
too brilliant, for the greatest mind needs a little saving
streak of earth-bound stupidity somewhere, so the feet can
be planted mulishly on the soil of some unshakable fact.
Sartre has learned all the dialectical tricks of Hegel, and he
can trot them out as he chooses with a virtuosity that is at
times excessive. It is a use of Hegel’s means toward an ex¬
istential rather than an idealistic end, of course, for Sartre

SARTRE

2 47

can never go the way of Hegel: he believes, in opposition
to the idealist, that Evil is real and cannot be redeemed,
that the negative can never be sublimated in the pure posi¬
tive being of the Absolute. Dachau and Belsen have taught
him that. Where Sartre goes beyond Heidegger is in giving
a more detailed elaboration of the negative side of human
existence. For Heidegger the essentially temporal being of
man is pervaded by the negatives of the nof-yet and no-
longer; but Sartre does much more with this, nosing out all
the sordid and seedy strands of nothingness that haunt our
human condition like a bad breath or body odor. Never in
the thought of the West has the Self been so pervaded by
negation. One would have to go to the East, to the Bud¬
dhist philosopher Nagarjuna (circa 200 a.d.), with his
doctrine of Anatman, the insubstantiality of the Self, to
meet as awesome a list of negations as Sartre draws up.
The Self, indeed, is in Sartre’s treatment, as in Buddhism,
a bubble, and a bubble has nothing at its center.

But neither in Buddhism nor in Sartre is the Self riddled
with negations to the end that we should, humanly speak¬
ing, collapse into the negative, into a purely passive nihil¬
ism. In Buddhism the recognition of the nothingness of our¬
selves is intended to lead into a striving for holiness and
compassion—the recognition that in the end there is nothing
that sustains us should lead us to love one another, as sur¬
vivors on a life raft, at the moment they grasp that the
ocean is shoreless and that no rescue ship is coming, can
only have compassion on one another. For Sartre, on the
other hand, the nothingness of the Self is the basis for the
will to action: the bubble is empty and will collapse, and
so what is left us but the energy and passion to spin that
bubble out? Man’s existence is absurd in the midst of a
cosmos that knows him not; the only meaning he can give
himself is through the free project that he launches out of
his own nothingness. Sartre turns from nothingness not to
compassion or holiness, but to human freedom as realized
in revolutionary activity. In this final appeal to the will to
action there is a secret kinship with Nietzsche; and nothing
justifies more fully Heidegger’s contention that Nietzsche is

248

IRRATIONAL MAN

the secret master of Western metaphysics in its final stage
than the way in which Sartre’s thinking comes around in
the end to join Nietzsche’s.

However great his initial dependence upon Heidegger,
Sartre’s philosophy moves finally in an altogether opposite
direction. He misses the very root of all of Heidegger’s
thinking, which is Being itself. There is, in Sartre, Being-
for-itself and Being-in-itself but there is no Being. How can
the For-itself and In-itself meet unless both stand out in the
open space of Being? We have here, in Sartre, the world
cleft once again into the Cartesian dualism of subject and
object, the world of consciousness and the world of things.
Sartre has advanced as the fundamental thesis of his Ex¬
istentialism the proposition that existence precedes essence.
This thesis is true for Heidegger as well, in the historical,
social, and biographical sense that man comes into exist¬
ence and makes himself to be what he is. But for Heidegger
another proposition is even more basic than this: namely,
Being precedes existence. For without the open clearing of
Being into which man can transcend himself, he could not
ex-sist, i.e., stand out beyond himself. Man can make him¬
self be what he is only because all his projects are revealed
to him as taking place within the open field or region of
Being. This is why Heidegger has declared, “I am not an
Existentialist”—because the Existentialists of the Sartrian
school do not grasp this priority of Being, and so their think¬
ing remains, like that of Descartes, locked up in the human
subject.

To be sxue, Sartre has gone a considerable step beyond
Descartes by making the essence of human consciousness
to be transcendence: that is, to be conscious is, immediately
and as such, to point beyond that isolated act of conscious¬
ness and therefore to be beyond or above it. Descartes, at
the extreme point of his thought, had envisaged conscious¬
ness as absolutely enclosed in itself, with the world of
external objects shut out, and all the past and future sus¬
pended. But this step forward by Sartre is not so considera¬
ble if the transcending subject has nowhere to transcend
himself: if there is not an open field or region of Being in

SABTKE

249

which the fateful dualism of subject and object ceases to
be. Modem philosophy from Descartes onward has asked
itself the question: How can the subject really know the ob¬
ject? By the time of Kant (and despite all the advances in
physical knowledge since Descartes) the human mind felt
itself so estranged from nature that Kant’s answer was that
the subject can never know the object-in-itself. And from
there it is but a short step to Nietzsche, who declares that
knowledge of the object-in-itself is unnecessary—all we need
is to be able to master it, and hence the Will to Power
becomes primary. (In Sartre what becomes primary is
rather the will to action.)

Now, Heidegger’s reversal of this development in modem
philosophy is radical and goes to the root of the matter;
and I do not think Sartre has seen this aspect of Heidegger’s
thought. For what Heidegger proposes is a more basic ques¬
tion than that of Descartes and Kant: namely, how is it
possible for the subject to be? and for the object to be?
And his answer is: Because both stand out in the truth, or
un-hiddenness, of Being. This notion of the truth of Being
is absent from the philosophy of Sartre; indeed, nowhere in
his vast Being and Nothingness does he deal with the prob¬
lem of truth in a radical and existential way: so far as he
understands truth at all, he takes it in the ordinary intel-
lectualistic sense that has been traditional with non-existen-
tial philosophers, In the end (as well as at his very be¬
ginning) Sartre turns out thus to be a Cartesian rationalist-
one, to be sure, whose material is impassioned and existen¬
tial, but for all that not any the less a Cartesian in his ul¬
timate dualism between the For-itself and the In-itself. And
the curious irony about this is that Sartre, whose name the
general public has come to take as synonymous with Ex¬
istentialism, is the one existential philosopher who does not
deal with the prime question that has been the central pas¬
sion of nearly all the Existentialists—the question, namely, of
a truth for man that is more than a truth of the intellect.

It is altogether consistent therefore that Sartre should ad¬
vertise his brand of Existentialism to the public as a new
humanism. Like every humanism, it teaches that the proper

250

IRRATIONAL MAN

study of mankind is man, or, as Marx put it, that the root
of mankind is man. But, again like every humanism, it
leaves unasked the question: What is the root of man? In
this search for roots for man—a search that has, as we have
seen, absorbed thinkers and caused the malaise of poets for
the last hundred and fifty years—Sartre does not participate.
He leaves man rootless. This may be because Sartre him¬
self is the quintessence of the urban intellectual—perhaps
the most brilliant urban intellectual of our time, but still
with the inevitable alienation of this type. He seems to
breathe the air of the modem city, of its caf6s, faubourgs,
and streets, as if there were no other home for man.

2. LITERATURE AS A MODE OF
ACTION

Such too is the impression with which his more strictly
literary works leave us. It is a paradox that although the
Existentialists have often been accused of really being lit¬
erary men or poets rather than philosophers (in the strict
academic sense), Sartre, the one Existentialist who has ful¬
filled himself as a literary man, pouring out novels, plays,
and literary essays, and who indeed earns his living now as
a professional writer, is in his philosophy the most intel-
lectualistic of all the Existentialists. The fact is that despite
Sartre’s enormous strictly literary output, men like Kierke¬
gaard and Nietzsche had more of the artist in them. They
were poets, and not only is there nothing of the poet in
Sartre, but he even shows little real feeling for poetry when
he talks about it. His conception of literature is a thor¬
oughly intellectual one: in his What is Literature (1947),
a long and brilliant essay in critical theory, he develops the
fundamental view that literature is a mode of action, an
act of the writer’s freedom that seeks to appeal to the free¬
dom of other individuals and eventually to the total free
collective of mankind. Stripped of its metaphysical lan¬
guage, his theory leads him to espouse a kind of social re¬
alism in literature. Thus the greatest living writer, he tells
us, is John Dos Passos. Such a judgment is rather shocking

SARTRE

251

as evidence of Sartre’s literary taste—or lack of it. But the
philosopher is really responding to the idea of Dos Passos’
fiction, not to the novels as works of art. Dos Passos is, for
Sartre, the perfect example of what he believes a writer
should do and what he himself tries to do in his own later
fiction: that is, grapple with the problems of man in his
time and milieu. Sartre’s novels are a technically dazzling,
streamlined variety of social realism. It is always to the
idea, and particularly the idea as it leads to social action,
that Sartre responds. Hence he cannot do justice, either in
his critical theory or in his actual practice of literary criti¬
cism, to poetry, which is precisely that form of human ex¬
pression in which the poet—and the reader who would en¬
ter the poet’s world—must let Being be, to use Heidegger’s
phrase, and not attempt to coerce it by the will to action
or the will to intellectualization. The absence of the poet
in Sartre, as a literary man, is thus another evidence of
what, on the philosophical level, leads to a deficiency in
his theory of Being.

Sartre is a writer of very powerful gifts, nevertheless,
who succeeds in his effects whenever the idea itself is able
to generate artistic passion and life. His first novel, Nausea
(1.938), may well be his best book for the very reason that
in it the intellectual and the creative artist come closest to
being joined. Much as ideas and the elaboration of ideas
figure in the book, the author has not shirked the novelist’s
tasks, and the remarkable thing is the life with which the
ideas are invested, which forms the intimate texture of the
hero’s experience and sensibility. The mood of this life is
disgust, which can as well as any other mood become the
occasion of discovery, a radical plunge into one’s own ex¬
istence. It is authentically human, this disgust, and turns
out to be novelistically exciting, though it has nothing like
the grand scope and implications of Celine’s disgust. Sar¬
tre’s treatment is more self-conscious and more subtle,
philosophically, but also more static; his disgust is not em¬
bodied, as Celine’s is, in the desperate picaresque of com¬
mon life and the anonymous depths of street characters.
Nausea is not so much a full novel as an extraordinary frag-

IBHATIONAJL MAN

252

ment of one. In his later fiction Sartre has turned away from
the narrow and intense form of the early book to a broader
panorama, and not always with entirely happy results.

These later novels—originally a trilogy, Les Chemins de
la Liberte (The Roads to Liberty) and now a tetralogy—
may go on being issued as endlessly as the roman fleuve
of Jules Romains, if Sartre’s volcanic activity as a writer
continues. One does wish that Sartre would pause for a
while and regroup his forces. The man really writes too
much. Perhaps if literature becomes a mode of action one
gets so caught up in it that one cannot stop the action.
These later novels of his contain remarkable things—great
scenes and passages—and their theme is the central Sartrian
one of the search for liberty, or rather for the realization
in life of that liberty that we always and essentially are,
sometimes even in spite of ourselves. Yet they are so uneven
in achievement, one regrets to see Sartre’s great talents wan¬
dering and thinning out like spilt milk.

Of his plays too, it may be said that his two earlier and
shorter ones—Les Mouches (The Flies ) and Huis Clos (No
Exit)—are his best. They are at any rate the things to rec¬
ommend to the reader who wishes to get the concrete drift
of Sartre’s philosophy but has no stomach for the elaborate
dialectic of Being and Nothingness.

The Flies, first produced while the Resistance was still
going on, is in form something of a set piece, since it deals
with the myth of Orestes and the Furies; but it is charged
throughout with a passion and eloquence bom of Sartre’s
own personal convictions. Orestes is the spokesman for the
Sartrian view of liberty. The solution of the play is not at
all like that in Aeschylus, for here there are no supernatu¬
ral agencies that can deliver Orestes from his guilt. He has
to take that guilt upon himself, and he does so at the end
of the play in a superbly defiant speech before the cosmic
Gestapo chief Jupiter; he accepts his guilt, he exclaims,
knowing that to do so is absurd because he is a man and
therefore free. In discharging his freedom man also wills to
accept the responsibility of it, thus becoming heavy with
his own guilt. Conscience, Heidegger has said, is the will

SARTRE 253

to be guilty—that is, to accept the guilt that we know will
be ours whatever course of action we take.

No Exit, the most sensational of Sartre’s dramatic suc¬
cesses, displays perhaps to their best advantage his real
talents as a writer: the intense driving energy of the play,
the passion of the ideas expressed, we can recognize as au¬
thentically his. The three characters of No Exit are planted
in Hell; they are being punished, rather in the manner of
Dante, by being given exactly the fruit of their evil itself.
Having practiced “bad faith” in life—which, in Sartre’s
terms, is the surrendering of one’s human liberty in order
to possess, or try to possess, one’s being as a thing—the
three characters now have what they had sought to sur¬
render themselves to. Having died, they cannot change any¬
thing in their past lives, which are exactly what they are,
no more and no less, just like the static being of things.
These three persons have no being other than that each
has in the eyes of the others; they exist in each other’s gaze,
in fact. But this is exactly what they longed for in life—to
lose their own subjective being by identifying themselves
with what they were in the eyes of other people. It is a
torment that people do in fact choose on earth; the bour¬
geois salaud and the anti-Semite, Sartre says, have chosen
as themselves their public stance or role, and thus really
exist not as free beings for themselves but as beings in the
eyes of others.

Despite the excitement and intensity of No Exit as the¬
ater, the distinctly intellectual nature of Sartre’s gifts once
again reveals itself. The three characters are thinly blocked
out, hardly more than single intense curves of action, il¬
lustrating the three evils of cowardice, Lesbianism, infan¬
ticide. Beyond a certain point they hold no surprises for
us, they are without contingency—and this from an author
who denies the existence of “character” as a fixed thing.
The same is true here as we observed earlier of Nausea:
Sartre succeeds most surely where the fusion of intellectual
with creative writer is most intimate and passionate. But
this is always achieved by the writer’s drawing secret drafts
on the philosopher’s credit. As a writer Sartre is always

254

IRRATIONAL, MAN

the impassioned rhetorician of the idea; and the rhetorician,
no matter how great and how eloquent his rhetoric, never
has the full being of the artist. If Sartre were really a poet
and an artist, we would have from him a different phi¬
losophy, as we shall see from turning back now to that
philosophy.

3 . AN EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY

One would expect that Being-in-itself, as the realm of
self-identical objects, would be invested by Sartre with
imagery suggesting stiffness and rigidity. Quite the con¬
trary: this vast realm is associated for him with images of
softness, stickiness, viscosity, corpulence, flabbiness. There
is too much of it, and it is heavy, like a fat lady in the
circus. In the famous episode in Nausea where the hero,
Roquentin, discovers existence in the experience of disgust,
he is looking at a chestnut tree in a provincial park: the
roots are tangled and excessive; the tree itself is de trap,
too much, excessive. Since it has no ultimate reason for ex¬
isting, Being-in-itself is absurd: its existence is a kind of su¬
perfetation. Its softness has the quality of the feminine. Be¬
hind all Sartre’s intellectual dialectic we perceive that the
In-itself is for him the archetype of nature: excessive, fruit¬
ful, blooming nature—the woman, the female.

The For-itself, by contrast, is for Sartre the masculine as¬
pect of human psychology: it is that in virtue of which man
chooses himself in his radical liberty, makes projects, and
thereby gives his life what strictly human meaning it has.

It is necessary to call attention to these feminine and mas¬
culine images that circulate in the background of Sartre’s
more formal concepts because in Being and Nothingness
and certain other writings he has attempted to sketch a new
and radical type of psychology. He calls it “existential psy¬
choanalysis,” and it has already caught on somewhat in Eu¬
rope; a group of psychiatrists there has espoused it, and
even in this country it has its professional adherents. This
new type of psychoanalysis, Sartre says, will replace or at
least supplement the older forms. The essence of man, ac-

SARTRE

255

cording to the French thinker, lies not in the Oedipus com¬
plex (as Freud held) nor in the inferiority complex (as Ad¬
ler maintained); it lies rather in the radical liberty of man’s
existence by which he chooses himself and so makes himself
what he is. Man is not to be seen as the passive plaything of
unconscious forces, which determine what he is to be. In
fact, Sartre denies the existence of an unconscious mind al¬
together; wherever the mind manifests itself, he holds, it is
conscious. A human personality or human life is not to be
understood in terms of some hypothetical unconscious at
work behind the scenes and pulling all the wires that ma¬
nipulate the puppet of consciousness. A man is his life, says
Sartre; which means that he is nothing more nor less than
the totality of acts that make up that life. And to under¬
stand truly a man’s life we have simply to grasp the struc¬
ture, at once single and complex, that binds together all
those overt acts—this structure being, in fact, just the unique
and irreplaceable project that is that individual’s life.

Sartre has given his theory a remarkably concrete appli¬
cation in a biographical study, Baudelaire, published here
in 1950. We cannot, according to Sartre, understand Bau¬
delaire’s life—his poetry, his ideas, his quarrels—by relating
all these things to his sexuality; on the contrary, the sexual¬
ity must be seen to take its place in the whole life, and
indeed to take its form and direction from the total project
that is that life. The choice of himself that made Baude¬
laire’s life what it was occurred, says Sartre, when he was
sent off to school as a boy and thus for the first time was
separated from his mother: alienated and intimidated by
his schoolfellows, he withdrew into himself, and there the
choice of himself as solitary and different began. Sartre
shows how this choice radiates, like the ripple from a stone,
through the whole life that followed: the cultivation of the
poet’s mind as a mirror of his solitude; his withdrawal from
the fatness and lubricity of nature in visions of a completely
inorganic world, a city of metals without a single tree, etc.,
etc. Sartre assembles a great number of details and corre¬
lates them well, so that we are left with a powerful and
unified image of Baudelaire’s life. But how convincing is his

256

IRRATIONAL MAN

picture as rendering the total truth about Baudelaire? And
how convincing is this new psychoanalysis he has here put
to the test?

In the first place, the choice of himself that Baudelaire
is supposed to have made at around the age of twelve
hardly appears to have been a conscious and resolute proj¬
ect, elected then and there for a whole lifetime. If it was
not conscious, then Sartre would be forced to admit the ex¬
istence of an unconscious; for if Baudelaire’s life was a single
project—that is, a choice of himself as the being he was to
be—reflected in all the myriad details of his life, the way in
which it was to be reflected was unknown to him at twelve,
and therefore the project itself, as a totality, was in good
part unconscious. If a human life is a concrete liberty ra¬
diating outward into all the details of our actions, some peo¬
ple may indeed know what their project is, what their life
means, but at any one time a vast portion of this project as
manifested in all our actions must be hidden from us. Sartre
does not admit this, but if he did he would be compelled
to take refuge in the notion of an unconscious project. In
any case, the unconscious has to be reintroduced as soon as
we seek to apply existential psychoanalysis concretely.

The merits of Sartre’s theory as psychology we leave to
the psychologists to determine; what concerns us here is
the philosophic thought that lies at the root of the psychol¬
ogy, And once again the root is Cartesianism: the identifi¬
cation of mind with consciousness, with the Cogito, is a
Cartesian identification. When Descartes said “I think,
therefore I am,” the statement—apart from its merely func¬
tional usage as marking a certain stage in his reasoning—
was, humanly speaking, the statement of a man who iden¬
tifies his own reality with his thought. The unconscious is
something alien and opposite: Consciousness is a realm of
clear and distinct ideas, but the world of the unconscious
is the fat, formless, fructifying domain of the In-itself of na¬
ture. This latter world can be forgotten and finally denied
to exist. A Cartesian subjectivity (which is what Sartre’s is)
cannot admit the existence of the unconscious because the
unconscious is the Other in oneself; and the glance of the

SARTRE 257

Other, in Sartre, is always like the stare of Medusa, fearful
and petrifying.

This relation to the Other is one of the most sensational
and best-known aspects of Sartre’s psychology. To the other
person, who looks at me from the outside, I seem an object,
a thing; my subjectivity with its inner freedom escapes his
gaze. Hence his tendency is always to convert me into the
object he sees. The gaze of the Other penetrates to the
depths of my existence, freezes and congeals it. It is this,
according to Sartre, that turns love and particularly sexual
love into a perpetual tension and indeed warfare. The lover
wishes to possess the beloved, but the freedom of the be¬
loved (which is his or her human essence) cannot be pos¬
sessed; hence, the lover tends to reduce the beloved to an
object for the sake of possessing it. Love is menaced always
by a perpetual oscillation between sadism and masochism:
In sadism I reduce the other to a mere lump, to be beaten
and manipulated as I choose, while in masochism I offer
myself as an object, but in an attempt to entrap the other
and undermine his freedom. With a dialectical ingenuity
that is almost fiendish Sartre exposes the interplay between
the two tendencies. There is no doubt that he sheds light
on a tension that must be perpetually present when two
persons love each other; but there does seem to be doubt,
after we have got through all his pulverizing analysis, that
the very excess of his dialectic may not actually make dis¬
appear the very possibility of love, as love sometimes (de¬
spite him) does really occur in our day-to-day life. What
has happened here is simply that Sartre has fallen victim
to his own philosophic principles: As he can find in his phi¬
losophy no field or region of Being in which the subject,
Being-for-itself, and the object, Being-in-itself, really meet,
so when he comes to psychology the self must remain irre¬
mediably opposed to the Other, and there is no area be¬
tween in which I may genuinely say Thou to the Other. A
Cartesian subjectivity, which Sartre’s fundamentally is,
must work itself out into just such a psychological theory
of the emotions as Sartre has given us.

What he is describing is at bottom the eternal war be-

IRRATIONAL MAN

258

tween the sexes, of which Adler spoke. In fact, if we strip
Sartre’s psychology of its particular philosophical terminol¬
ogy, it turns out to be fundamentally an Adlerian psychol¬
ogy. Adler, following Nietzsche, based his psychology on
the Will to Power, and this, as we see from the endless cycle
of sadism-masochism to which he condemns love, is true of
Sartre too. Eros disappears before the Will to Power. Sartre
is driven once again into the Nietzschean camp: where Be¬
ing is lost—the Being that would unite the For-itself, the
subject, with the In-itself, the object—man is left to find his
meaning only in his mastery over objects. What is the Sar-
trian project that makes up our very being but a confirma¬
tion of the Adlerian notion of a “guiding thread or motive”
by which we try to unify and give meaning to our whole
life? Like Adler’s, Sartre’s is fundamentally a masculine psy¬
chology; it misunderstands or disparages the psychology of
woman. The humanity of man consists in the For-itself, the
masculine component by which we choose, make projects,
and generally commit ourselves to the life of action. The ele¬
ment of masculine protest, to use Adler’s term, is strong
throughout Sartre’s writings—whether it be the disgust of
Mathieu (in Roads to Liberty) at his pregnant mistress, or
the disgust (it is fundamentally the same disgust) of
Roquentm, in Nausea, at the bloated roots of the chestnut
tree; or Sartre’s philosophical analysis (in Being and Noth¬
ingness) of the viscous, the thick, sticky substance that
would entrap his liberty like the soft threat of the body of
a woman. And the woman is a threat, for the woman is
nature and Sartrian man exists in the liberty of his project,
which, since it is ultimately unjustified and unjustifiable, in
effect sunders him totally from nature. The whole of Sartre’s
psychology is thus the Cartesian dualism given a new and
startling modem content.

We are now in a better position to assess Sartre’s funda¬
mental notion of liberty. He is right to make the liberty of
choice, which is the liberty of a conscious action, total and
absolute, no matter how small the area of our power: in
choosing, I have to say No somewhere, and this No, which
is total and totally exclusive of other alternatives, is dread-

SARTRE

259

ful; but only by shutting myself up in it is any resoluteness
of action possible. A friend of mine, a very intelligent and
sensitive man, was over a long period in the grip of a neu¬
rosis that took the form of indecision in the face of almost
every occasion of life; sitting in a restaurant, he could not
look at the printed menu to choose his lunch without see¬
ing the abyss of the negative open before his eyes, on the
page, and so falling into a sweat. (He was not a Sartrian,
and had not even read Sartre; but his description of his own
experience was exactly in terms of this abyss of Nothing
opening before his eyes on the page.) Critics may make
the superficial observation that this only shows how silly
and neurotic Sartre’s view of freedom is. But, on the con¬
trary, it confirms Sartre’s analysis of freedom, for only be¬
cause freedom is what he says it is could this man have
been frightened by it and have retreated into the anxiety
of indecision. The neurosis consisted in the fact that free¬
dom, that total and absolute thing, could cause the abyss
to open on such trifling occasions. But the example points
up also where Sartre’s theory is decidedly lacking: it does
not show us the kind of objects in relation to which our
human subjectivity can define itself in a free choice that is
meaningful and not neurotic. This is so because Sartre’s
doctrine of liberty was developed out of the experience of
extreme situations: the victim says to his totalitarian oppres¬
sor, No, even if you kill me; and he shuts himself up in this
No and will not be shaken from it. Our resoluteness in any
choice exacts from us something as total as this, although
it need not be exacted from us in so violent and extreme a
situation. But he who shuts himself up in the No can be
demoniacal, as Kierkegaard pointed out; he can say No
against himself, against his own nature. Sartre’s doctrine of
freedom does not really comprehend the concrete man who
is an undivided totality of body and mind, at once, and
without division, both In-itself and For-itself; but rather an
isolated aspect of this total condition, the aspect of man al¬
ways at the margin of his existence.

Thus the crucial question, Sartre tells us, is this: Under
what exceptional conditions does a man really experience

IRHATIONAL MAN

260

his freedom? Notice the word “exceptional” here. Why not
ask instead: Under what ordinary, average, everyday con¬
ditions does a man experience his freedom? An artist—and
particularly not an intellectual artist like Sartre—when the
work is going well experiences his freedom as just that
effortless burgeoning, swelling, flowing, which has for him
the quality of the inevitable flow of nature. It is like that
pear tree blooming there in the yard—very different from
the nauseating chestnut tree of Roquentin—effortlessly and
beautifully bringing forth its fruit into the sunlight. Because
Sartre’s psychology recognizes only the conscious, it cannot
comprehend a form of freedom that operates in that zone
of the human personality where conscious and unconscious
flow into each other. Being limited to the conscious, it in¬
evitably becomes an ego psychology; hence freedom is un¬
derstood only as the resolute project of the conscious ego.

Under what day-to-day conditions does the religious man
—to take another example—experience his freedom? That,
from Sartre’s thoroughly secular point of view, the beliefs
of religion are absurd does not enter into this question; for
the religious psychology does in fact exist, and any psycho¬
logical theory that failed to cover it would be inadequate.
How does a St. Paul experience his freedom? He has died
the death, cast off the bondage of an old self, and now he
lives and energetically organizes a church: “And yet not I
live, but Christ liveth in me.” His freedom is the surrender
to the redeeming image of something greater than himself.
This is the freedom of spiritual man, not Cartesian man.
The project that is the life of a St. Paul is not primarily a
conscious choice of himself, but is the result of a conversion
that arose out of the depths of his unconscious. Cartesian
man knows neither the freedom of spirit nor of nature, for
in both of these the dualism of the In-itself and the For-
itself breaks down.

Or, to take a third example, consider the psychology of
the ordinary woman. Not of the women one meets in
Sartre’s novels or plays; nor of that woman, his friend, who
wrote a book of feminine protest. The Second Sex, which
is in reality the protest against being feminine. No, take a

SABTRE

26 l

totally ordinary woman, one of that great number whose
being is the involvement with family and children, and
some of whom are happy at it, or at least as humanly ful¬
filled by it as the male by his own essentially masculine
projects. What sense does it make to say that such a wom¬
an’s identity is constituted by her project? Her project is
family and children, and these do in fact make up a total
human commitment; but it is hardly a project that has is¬
sued out of the conscious ego. Her whole life, with what¬
ever freedom it reveals, is rather the unfolding of nature
through her. As soon as we begin to think about the psy¬
chology of women, Sartre’s psychology shows itself indeed
to be exclusively a masculine affair; but the masculine that
—alone, unjustified, and on the very margins of existence—
has sundered itself from nature.

No doubt all of Sartre’s theory is, as perhaps every psy¬
chological theory must be, a projection of his own personal
psychology; there are plenty of signs of this in the novels
and plays, where he reveals himself copiously. But he is
also a thinker passionately identified with his ideas; and for
us the significance of his complicated and often brilliant ex¬
ploration of human psychology lies in the fact that it stems
ultimately from Cartesian dualism, and brings to comple¬
tion that sundering of man from nature with which Des¬
cartes initiated the modem epoch. Sartre is certainly right
in insisting that man comes to exist only by sundering him¬
self from nature—that this is his human fate in a universe
that knows him not; but it is a question of how far this
sundering can go without the human project becoming de¬
moniacal, insane, or simply too brittle to have any human
substance. In our own lives, when they are going at their
best, the In-itself, the unconscious—or nature—is perpetually
flowing through and sustaining the For-itself of our con¬
sciousness.

Sartre’s freedom is demoniacal. It is rootless freedom.
This doctrine happens, of course, to be maintained by a
man of great good will, generosity, and courage; and the
project he has chosen as his own, in which he has chosen

262

IRRATIONAL MAN

himself, is the humanitarian and liberal one of revolutionary
action. Sartre’s long and checkered relations with the Com¬
munists would be a matter of high comedy if they were
not so clearly a part of the general contemporary tragedy.
Sartre believed that the Communist Party was truly the
party of the working class, and he was willing therefore to
cast his lot with that party in the field of practical politics.
Meanwhile, in philosophy, he intended to retain his own
freedom, including his doctrine of freedom. He came to the
Communists, offering them all Iris talents and energy—and
was rebuffed. In practical politics Sartre has shown himself
very naive, but in the course of his philosophical quarrels
with the Communists he has produced some of the best in¬
tellectual polemic of our time. It was a case, in these po¬
lemics, of Cartesian man against the Communist robot; and
whatever reservations we may have about Cartesian man,
he is in part human and dwarfs the party robot. Besides,
Sartre is a man of surpassing intelligence, which his oppo¬
nents among the Communist intellectuals certainly were
not. What lay behind the entire controversy was the
shadow that Marxist man does not face; Sartre based his
revolutionary activity upon a free choice, the Marxist upon
an objective historic process, the former recognizing the in¬
alienable subjectivity of man, the latter reducing man to an
object in a process. Moreover, Sartre’s atheism states can¬
didly what the Philistine atheism of Communism (and all
other Philistine forms of atheism) does not have enough im¬
agination or courage to say: that man is an alien in the
universe, unjustified and unjustifiable, absurd in the simple
sense that there is no Leibnitzian reason sufficient to ex¬
plain why he or his universe exists. Sartre’s atheism—the
way in which he exists in it—does not lose its grasp of the
essentially problematic nature of man. And therein Sartre
points the way to the question Marxist man will have to
ask, the devil he will have to face, if and when the classless
society should ever be achieved.

It has been remarked that Kierkegaard’s statement of the
religious position is so severe that it has turned many peo¬
ple who thought themselves religious to atheism. Analo-

SARTRE

263

gously, Sartre’s view of atheism is so stark and bleak that
it seems to turn many people toward religion. This is ex¬
actly as it should be. The choice must be hard either way;
for man, a problematic being to his depths, cannot lay hold
of his ultimate commitments with a smug and easy security.

It may be that, as the modem world moves on, the
Sartrian land of freedom will be more and more the only
kind man can experience. As society becomes more totali¬
tarian, the islands of freedom get smaller and more cut off
from the mainland and from each other—which is to say
from any spontaneous interchange with nature or the com¬
munity of other human beings. Sartre’s Orestes says to his
celestial oppressor, “I am a man, Jupiter.” One imagines the
last Resistant of the last Resistance saying No in a prison
cell in the Lubianka; saying No without any motive of self¬
advantage and without any hope that future humans will
take up his cause, but saying No nonetheless simply be¬
cause he is a man and his liberty cannot be taken from him.
This last man would exist in a night darker than that into
which the great Descartes cast himself, in that historic inn
in Holland, when he paused to think and said No to the
demon. It cannot be said that Sartre has not given us good
warning.

INTEGRAL VS.
RATIONAL MAN

Part Four

THE PLACE OF THE FURIES

Chapter Eleven

This book began with a look at the present situation of
man and of philosophy; then outlined the historical back¬
ground against which this situation must be understood;
and moved on to a view of four philosophers who have
given explicit formulation to the issues implicit in that his¬
tory. Now, at the end, we come back to our beginning:
to the situation of the world here and now, from which all
understanding must start and to which it must return. In
all existential thinking it is we ourselves, the questioners,
who are ultimately in question.

The four philosophers whom we have considered—Kier¬
kegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre—do not in any
way represent all the facets of Existentialism; there may
even be, among the Existentialists whom we have not
treated at length, figures that would prove more humanly
appealing to the individual reader. These four, however,
seem to me to be, intellectually speaking, the most consid¬
erable figures that the movement has yet brought forward.
In any case they pose, for me, the chief questions that stand
at issue for philosophy, and indeed for man himself, at this
point in Western history. The fact that certain of these
thinkers—Heidegger in particular—have disclaimed the
label of Existentialist should not deter us from recognizing
in them a well-defined movement. We may remember that
Kant once protested against the term “idealist” as applied
to himself—and with good reason; but history in its rough-
and-ready need for groupings overrode his protest, and as

268

IRRATIONAL MAN

an idealist he now stands classified in all the textbooks—
and with equally good reason. Perhaps the ungentle hand
of history is guided by a keener sense of reality than is
possessed by philosophers themselves, as they squabble
over the niceties of how they are to be labeled. History
senses—beneath and beyond all the differences and squab¬
bles—the unity of source, of influence, and of milieu; just
as the reader of this book will sense, I hope, by this time
that there are certain clearly defined themes and even some
definite and agreed-upon theses common to all the figures
we have called Existentialists, and to something that can
be called existential philosophy.

The four figures we have considered are, in any case,
sufficient for our purposes here, where the aim has been
not to provide a survey or compendium of Existentialism
but rather to deal with the more central question: What is
the meaning of Existentialism? Here we are using “mean¬
ing” not in its external sense, as a body of more or less or¬
ganized information on what these philosophers are talking
about, but in a more internal sense: What, we have asked,
is really happening in our own historical existence that it
should come to expression in this way and in these philoso¬
phers? Or—in terms that echo Heidegger—what is happen¬
ing within the Being of the West?

This has been our single theme and subject throughout;
and it brings us back now to the point from which we
started, the present situation.

1. THE CRYSTAL PALACE UNMANNED

It may seem strange, particularly to American read¬
ers, that rationalism has been made so much of a target
throughout this book. As a teacher of philosophy, a very
dubious profession in this country, I am in a position to ob¬
serve how precarious a hold the intellect has upon Ameri¬
can life; and this is not true merely of the great majority
of students but of cultured people, of intellectuals, to whom
here in America a philosophical idea is an alien and em¬
barrassing thing. In their actual life Americans are not

THE PLACE OF THE FUBIES 269

only a non-intellectual but an anti-intellectual people. The
charm of the American as a new human type, his rough-
and-ready pragmatism, his spontaneity and openness to ex¬
perience are true of him only because he is unreflective by
nature. The two greatest American writers of the present
day—Hemingway and Faulkner—are superior artists be¬
cause of their power over physical fact, not because of their
grasp of ideas or of the subtleties of psychology. What
point, then, do the various animadversions upon rationalism
—as put forth by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger—have
for Americans today? Americans are not likely at this point
to swallow a classical Platonism—to become the dedicated
priests of godlike reason as philosophers in the tradition of
Plato became.

The fact is that a good dose of intellectualism—genuine
intellectualism—would be a very helpful thing in American
life. But the essence of the existential protest is that ration¬
alism can pervade a whole civilization, to the point where
the individuals in that civilization do less and less thinking,
and perhaps wind up doing none at all. It can bring this
about by dictating the fundamental ways and routines by
which life itself moves. Technology is one material incarna¬
tion of rationalism, since it derives from science; bureauc¬
racy is another, since it aims at the rational control and
ordering of social life; and the two—technology and bu¬
reaucracy—have come more and more to rule our lives.

But it is not so much rationalism as abstractness that is
the existentialists’ target; and the abstractness of life in this
technological and bureaucratic age is now indeed some¬
thing to reckon with. The last gigantic step forward in the
spread of technologism has been the development of mass
art and mass media of communication: the machine no
longer fabricates only material products; it also makes
minds. Millions of people live by the stereotypes of mass
art, the most virulent form of abstractness, and their capac¬
ity for any kind of human reality is fast disappearing. If
here and there in the lonely crowd (discovered by Kierke¬
gaard long before David Riesman) a face is lit by a human
gleam, it quickly goes vacant again in the hypnotized stare

27 °

IRRATIONAL MAN

at the TV screen. When an eclipse of the moon was tele¬
vised some years ago, E. B. White wrote in The New Yorker
that he felt some drastic turning point in history had ar¬
rived : people could have seen the real thing by looking out
of their windows, but instead they preferred looking at the
reflection of it on the screen. Kierkegaard condemned the
abstractness of his time, calling it an Age of Reflection, but
what he seems chiefly to have had in mind was the ab¬
stractness of the professorial intellectual, seeing not real life
but the reflection of it in his own mind. We, however, have
fabricated for our time a new kind of abstractness, on a
mass scale; through our extraordinary mastery of technique
we provide a ready-made reflection in place of the real, and
not for university dons but for the millions. Our journey
into untruth has gone farther than Kierkegaard could have
imagined.

To be rational is not the same as to be reasonable. In my
time I have heard the most hair-raising and crazy things
from very rational men, advanced in a perfectly rational
way; no insight or feelings had been used to check the rea¬
soning at any point. Nowadays, we accept in our public and
political life the most humanly unreasonable behavior, pro¬
vided it wears a rational mask and speaks in officialese,
which is the rhetoric of rationality itself. Witness the recent
announcement that science had been able to perfect a
“clean” hydrogen bomb—to be sure, not perfectly “clean”
yet, but “95 per cent clean” or even “96 per cent clean.”
Of course the quantitative measurement makes the matter
sound so scientific and rational that people no longer bother
to ask themselves the human meaning of the whole thing.
No doubt, they tell themselves, there must be a perfectly ra¬
tional chain of arguments which, starting from the premise
that there must be hydrogen bombs, leads to the conclusion
that there must be “clean” hydrogen bombs—otherwise war
itself would become impossible! The incident makes us sus¬
pect that, despite the increase in the rational ordering of
life in modem times, men have not become the least bit
more reasonable in the human sense of the word. A perfect

THE PLACE OF THE HTJRIES ZJ1

rationality might not even be incompatible with psychosis;
it might, in fact, even lead to the latter.

It may be objected that the fear of what may happen to
mankind in our time—the specific fear, today, of atomic ex¬
termination—is a recurrent thing; man has such fears in ev¬
ery age, and yet has managed to survive all his presenti¬
ments of disaster. Karl Jaspers cites the complaint of an
Egyptian of four thousand years ago that things are going
to rack and ruin in his time: “Robbers abound. . . . No
one ploughs the land. People are saying: We do not know
what will happen from day to day.” And Ortega y Gasset
quotes the lament of the Latin poet Horace, uttered when
the Roman Empire was at its very height. “We [Horace
and his contemporaries] are the degenerate descendants of
fathers who in their turn were degenerate from their fore¬
bears." The harking back to an earlier and better state of
mankind, to some golden age of the past, is indeed a perpet¬
ual tendency of human nature. The present situation must
always, when we come to see it fully, appear threatening;
it is a situation, we think, that has to be transformed or
redeemed. Today is always and for all men the digging of
one s way out of the ruins of yesterday. However, it is not
a question of rating our own age lower—or higher—than the
past; as we have indicated throughout this book, ours is an
age of unparalleled achievements and power, and in a va¬
riety of fields. The question, rather, is one of assessing the
present in all its uniqueness. If, as the Existentialists hold,
an authentic life is not handed to us on a platter but involves
our own act of self-determination (self-finitization) within
our time and place, then we have got to know and face up
to that time, both in its threats and its promises. It will not
do to say that every age has been like this, that man has
always felt threatened and yet managed to survive. The
point is precisely that every age is different: each time has
been unique, both in what it promised and what it threat¬
ened; and sometimes the catastrophe has occurred. It is the
very uniqueness of the present in which we live that affords
man his unprecedented power —including ultimately the
power to blow himself and his planet to bits. But the law

272 IRRATIONAL MAN

of opposites, the oldest tragic wisdom of the race, suggests
that at the very height of his power man is bound to ex¬
perience, as Oedipus did, his absolute impotence. There are
a good many straws in the wind today that point in that
direction, including the testimony of modem art, as we have
seen. I for one am personally convinced that man will not
take his next great step forward until he has drained to the
lees the bitter cup of his own powerlessness. The trouble
is, however, that this chastening experience may come only
with the destruction of his world—a calamity in which the
tragic hero also destroys himself. That is why all the
politics-as-usual of today seems so terribly antiquated; it
lags so sadly behind the actual situation of man—and be¬
hind even our present knowledge of man.

The two chief contestants in the present international sit¬
uation are both rooted in the Enlightenment, so far at any
rate as their respective civilizations reflect any general con¬
ception of man. The uniqueness of the United States is that
it is a nation that was founded at a certain time in history
in the full light of historical consciousness; it did not grow
out of the soil of its own prehistory. Moreover, it was
founded in the eighteenth century in the very heyday of
the Enlightenment, and by men who participated in the
clear rationality of that period. The soil of America ap¬
peared to the American as an alien wilderness to be con¬
quered, something inimical, set over against himself, not as
something out of which he himself and his institutions had,
so to speak, grown. Lacking the roots the European has, in
prehistory and the chthonic unconscious, the American
shows an admirable freedom and flexibility in conscious¬
ness, particularly of a practical kind. But with this goes also
that celebrated American “innocence”—a quality which in
philosophical terms is simply an ignorance of how question¬
able a being man really is and which strikes the European
as alien and possibly even somewhat disingenuous. Hence,
the ineptness of the American in handling the human side
of foreign politics, and his inability to understand why his
European allies should look at him askance and question
his generosity and good will. Sartre recounts a conversation

THE PLACE OF THE FURIES

273

he had with an American while visiting in this country. The
American insisted that all international problems could be
solved if men would just get together and be rational; Sartre
disagreed and after a while discussion between them be¬
came impossible. “I believe in the existence of evil,” says
Sartre, “and he does not.” What the American has not yet
become aware of is the shadow that surrounds all human
Enlightenment.

The philosophy of the other contestant—to look on its best
and most “idealistic” side, a side that still enlists the enthu¬
siasm of millions of men—is Marxist humanism. This hu¬
manism harks back to the justly celebrated statement of
Marx: “To be radical is to go to the root of the question.
Now the root of mankind is man.” Marx here speaks as a
member of the generation of Feuerbach and the young He¬
gelians, those who turned against Hegel and his Idea of the
State and toward the concrete man, the historical creature
of flesh and blood. This actual and historical man, they said,
is to be the root of mankind, the root of society and the
state. But there is a further question that this leaves un¬
asked: In what is the individual man to be rooted? The
thoroughly problematic nature of man, this highly question¬
able and self-questioning animal, is conveniently and fate¬
fully dropped out of sight. Marx turned his attention to the
social problem, assuming that the only thing in the way of
man’s coming into his full humanity was the capitalist sys¬
tem. In this he was simply echoing the Enlightenment’s
optimistic assumption that, since man is a rational animal,
the only obstacles to his fulfillment must be objective and
social ones. Communism, following Marx, has thus always
exhibited a strange ambivalence: the most naively optimis¬
tic view of human nature in theory, and in practice the most
brutal and cynical attitude toward human beings.

Marxism is the ideology of Communism; but in fact and
in its actual historical unfolding, the real philosopher of
Communism, or what Communism has become, is Nietz¬
sche, as we have seen. The question of power has become
paramount; it usurps everything else, as is shown in the
recent remarkable book by Milovan Djilas, The New Class.

274

IRRATIONAL MAN

The collective effort to master nature, to have power over
things, requires that men have power over other men; and
the movement ends by thinking of the men underneath
merely as things, for its thinking has long since discarded
all the categories that recognize the humanity of the person
and his subjectivity. The historical turning point in this case
was Lenin, the practical genius and the St. Paul of the Com¬
munist movement. Before returning from exile in 1917,
Lenin had written a little pamphlet, State and Revolution,
in which he dealt with human nature in terms of the most
naive and utopian rationalism; but as soon as he was back
in Russia and engaged in actual politics there was one, and
only one, question before his mind as an active politician:
power. Marxist manuals of philosophy refer to all philoso¬
phies that deal with the human subject as forms of “irra¬
tionalism.” Their rationalism, of course, consists in technical
intelligence, in the power over things (and over men con¬
sidered simply as things); and this exalting of the technical
intelligence over every other human attribute becomes de¬
moniacal in action, as recent history has shown.

Behind the problem of politics, in the present age, lies
the problem of man, and this is what makes all thinking
about contemporary problems so thorny and difficult. The
intellectual collapse that occurred in this country after the
decade of the 1930s, when our intellectuals had been able
to submerge themselves totally in a program of political ac¬
tion, shows that philosophy can no longer be considered a
mere appendage to politics. On the contrary, anyone who
wishes to meddle in politics today had better come to some
prior conclusions as to what man is and what, in the end,
human life is all about. I say “in the end” deliberately be¬
cause the neglect of first and of last things does not—as
so-called “practical” people hope—go unpunished, but has
a disastrous way of coming in the back door and upsetting
everything. The speeches of our politicians show no recog¬
nition of this; and yet in the hands of these men, on both
sides of the Atlantic, lies the catastrophic power of atomic
energy.

Existentialism is the counter-Enlightenment come at last

THE PLACE OF THE FUMES

275

to philosophic expression; and it demonstrates beyond any¬
thing else that the ideology of the Enlightenment is thin,
abstract, and therefore dangerous. (I say its “ideology,” for
the practical task of the Enlightenment is still with us: In
everyday life we must continue to be critics of a social order
that is still based everywhere on oppression, injustice, and
even savagery—such being the peculiar tension of mind that
we as responsible human beings have to maintain today.)
The finitude of man, as established by Heidegger, is per¬
haps the death blow to the ideology of the Enlightenment,
for to recognize this finitude is to acknowledge that man
will always exist in untruth as well as truth. Utopians who
still look forward to a future when all shadows will be dis¬
persed and mankind will dwell in a resplendent Crystal Pal¬
ace will find this recognition disheartening. But on second
thought, it may not be such a bad thing to free ourselves
once and for all from the worship of the idol of progress;
for utopianism—whether the brand of Marx or of Nietzsche
—by locating the meaning of man in the future leaves hu¬
man beings here and now, as well as all mankind up to this
point, without their own meaning. If man is to be given
meaning, the Existentialists have shown us, it must be here
and now; and to think this insight through is to recast the
whole tradition of Western thought. The realization that all
human truth must not only shine against an enveloping
darkness, but that such truth is even shot through with its
own darkness may be depressing, and not only to Utopians.
But it has the virtue of restoring to man his sense of the
primal mystery surrounding all things, a sense of mystery
from which the glittering world of his technology estranges
him, but without which he is not truly human.

2. THE FURIES

In comparison with traditional philosophy, or with other
contemporary schools of philosophy, Existentialism, as we
have seen, seeks to bring the whole man—the concrete in¬
dividual in the whole context of his everyday life, and in
his total mystery and questionableness—into philosophy.

276

IRRATIONAL MAN

This is attempted with varying degrees of success by the
different Existentialists; but the attempt itself, even if it did
not succeed at all, would be necessary and valuable for our
time. In modem philosophy particularly (philosophy since
Descartes), man has figured almost exclusively as an epis¬
temological subject—as an intellect that registers sense-data,
makes propositions, reasons, and seeks the certainty of in¬
tellectual knowledge, but not as the man underneath all
this, who is bom, suffers, and dies. Naturally, the attempt
to see the whole or integral man, in place of the rational
or epistemological fragment of him, involves our taking a
look at some unpleasant things. Nowadays there is much
glib talk, particularly in this country, about “the whole
man,” or “the well-rounded individual,” the terms evoking,
in this context, only the pleasant prospect of graciously en¬
larging the Self by taking extension courses, developing
constructive hobbies, or taking an active part in social move¬
ments. But the whole man is not whole without such un¬
pleasant things as death, anxiety, guilt, fear and trembling,
and despair, even though journalists and the populace have
shown what they think of these things by labeling any
philosophy that looks at such aspects of human life as
“gloomy” or “merely a mood of despair.” We are still so
rooted in the Enlightenment—or uprooted in it—that these
unpleasant aspects of fife are like the Furies for us: hostile
forces from which we would escape. And of course the
easiest way to escape the Furies, we think, is to deny that
they exist. It seems to me no accident at all that modem
depth psychology has come into prominence in the same
period as Existentialism and for the same reason: namely,
that certain unpleasant things the Enlightenment had
dropped into the limbo of the unconscious have begun to
backfire and have forced themselves finally upon the atten¬
tion of modem man.

This is not the first time man has been faced with the
problem of placating the Furies. At the very dawn of West¬
ern history the Greeks went through a similar experience,
the record of which has been left us in the great Oresteia
trilogy of Aeschylus; a record in which we can also read a

THE PLACE OF THE FUMES

2.-77

prophecy of our own conflict (with differences) as well as
the only reasonable proposal for its solution (with dif¬
ferences) .

Clytemnestra, in the tragedy, has killed her husband
Agamemnon; and Orestes, their son, is directed by Apollo,
an extremely promasculine deity, to avenge his father’s
murder. Orestes kills his mother and is immediately set
upon by the Furies, the old goddesses of night and earth
who were responsible for the protection of the lines of blood
and who therefore must punish the son who murders his
mother, as the perpetrator of the most horrible crime man
can imagine. Up to a point the drama revolves around hu¬
man beings, with the gods of course always in the back¬
ground; but when we come to the last play of the trilogy,
the Eumenides, in which Orestes meets his final ordeal, the
gods themselves take the center of the stage, and Orestes,
the human bearer of the conflict, is dwarfed in their shadow.
The conflict is now between Apollo, the new god—and the
god of the Enlightenment— on the one hand and the Furies,
the old matriarchal goddesses of the family and the soil, on
the other. Apollo is protecting Orestes, and the Furies seek
his destruction. There ensues a trial between the rival
deities on the hill of the Acropolis at Athens; the verdict of
the jury, comprised of citizens, will set Orestes free or hand
him over irremediably to the Furies.

The modem reader who skims the play too hastily may
get the impression that this trial is a rather prosaic piece of
legalism, hardly worthy of the sublime drama that has pre¬
ceded it; but for the Greek this trial was as intense and
dramatic as the more sensational scene in which Orestes
murders his mother—was, in fact, the nub of the whole mat¬
ter. Aeschylus’ tragedy records the moment in Greek history
at which the old matriarchal deities were superseded by
the new patriarchal gods of Olympus; but the average
Greek citizen still remembered the older deities and he was
still a little bit uneasy forced to choose between old and
new. Thus at the very beginning of the Eumenides we are
told by the Pythian priestess that the first prophetess or
seer among the gods was old Mother Earth herself; it was

278 IRRATIONAL MAN

only very lately that Apollo had come to occupy the tem¬
ples of the oracles throughout Greece. This development
from the old matriarchal to the new patriarchal deities
parallels the development of Greek consciousness itself, as
it advanced in civilization and enlightenment. The question
of the play, thus interpreted, becomes: What kind of
tribute will this advanced consciousness have to pay to the
old earth-bound unconscious?

The vote of the citizen jurors is a tie; and Orestes (as
was the Greek rule) is allowed to go free. The tying vote
has been cast by Athena herself, an ambiguous female
deity, in spirit halfway between man and woman. The
Furies wail disconsolately and threaten all kinds of destruc¬
tion on the land. They are placated, however, by being told
that they shall not be entirely displaced by this new up¬
start of enlightenment, Apollo; they are to be given a re¬
vered place, a sanctuary, and every child bom of woman
shall be bom into their protection. The goddess Athena,
who was bom out of the brain of Zeus, in allotting this final
justice to the Furies, acknowledges that they are older and
wiser than she.

It would be a mistake to take this as merely a cool barter,
a quid pro quo. Greek religion was in deadly earnest here,
and perhaps it was never wiser. The Furies are really to
be revered and not simply bought off; in fact, they cannot
be bought off (not even by our modem tranquilizers and
sleeping pills) but are to be placated only through being
given their just and due respect. They are the darker side
of life, but in their own way as holy as the rest. Indeed,
without them there would be no experience of the holy at
all. Without the shudder of fear or the trembling of dread
man would never be brought to stand face to face with
himself or his life; he would only drift aimlessly off into the
insubstantial realm of Laputa.

Aeschylus’ tragedy speaks to us in an archaic language,
but it does speak, and directly. We are the children of an
enlightenment, one which we would like to preserve; but
we can do so only by making a pact with the old goddesses.
The centuries-long evolution of human reason is one of

THE PLACE OF THE FUMES

279

man’s greatest triumphs, but it is still in process, still in¬
complete, still to be. Contrary to the rationalist tradition,
we now know that it is not his reason that makes man man,
but rather that reason is a consequence of that which really
makes him man. For it is man’s existence as a self-transcend¬
ing self that has forged and formed reason as one of its
projects. As such, man’s reason is specifically human (but
no more and no less than his art and his religion) and to
be revered. All the values that have been produced in the
course of the long evolution of reason—everything that goes
under the heading of liberalism, intelligence, a decent and
reasonable view of life—'we wish desperately to preserve and
enlarge, in the turmoil of modem life. But do we need to
be persuaded now, after all that has happened in this
twentieth century, how precariously situated these reasona¬
ble ideals are in relation to the subterranean forces of life,
and how small a segment of the whole and concrete man
they actually represent? We have to establish a working
pact between that segment and the whole of us; but a pact
requires compromise, in which both sides concede some¬
thing, and in this case particularly the rationalism of the
Enlightenment will have to recognize that at the very heart
of its light there is also a darkness.

It would be the final error of reason—the point at which
it succumbs to its own hubris and passes over into its
demoniacal opposite, unreason—to deny that the Furies
exist, or to strive to manipulate them out of existence. Noth¬
ing can be accomplished by denying that man is an es¬
sentially troubled being, except to make more trouble. We
may, of course, be able to buy off the Furies for a while;
being of the earth and ancient, they have been around
much longer than the rational consciousness that would en¬
tirely supplant them, and so they can afford to wait. And
when they strike, more likely than not it will be through
the offending faculty itself. It is notorious that brilliant peo¬
ple are often the most dense about their own human blind
spot, precisely because their intelligence, so clever in other
things, conceals it from them; multiply this situation a thou¬
sandfold, and you have a brilliant scientific and technologi-

IRRATIONAL MAN

280

cal civilization that could run amuck out of its own sheer
uprooted cleverness. The solution proposed by Greek tragic
wisdom through the drama of Aeschylus may not, then, be
as frightening as we imagine: in giving the Furies their
place, we may come to recognize that they are not such
alien presences as we think in our moments of evading
them. In fact, far from being alien, they are part of our¬
selves, like all gods and demons. The conspiracy to forget
them, or to deny that they exist, thus turns out to be only
one more contrivance in that vast and organized effort by
modem society to flee from the self.

Appendices

NEGATION, FINITUDE, AND
THE NATURE OF MAN*

Appendix I

Nothing is more real than nothing.

SAMUEL BECKETT

In Ernest Hemingway’s Winner Take Nothing (1933)
there is one story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” that
could be meditated on very profitably by contemporary
philosophers. Toward the end of it Hemingway gives the
interior monologue of his hero, a waiter in a cafe some¬
where in Spain, in these words:

Turning oS the electric light he continued the conver¬
sation with himself . . . what did he fear? It was not
fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well.
It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was
only that and light was all it needed and a certain clean¬
ness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he
knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.
Our nada, who are in nada, nada be thy name thy king¬
dom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is nada. Give
us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we
nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver
us from nada; pues nada.

* This paper was read at a meeting of the American Philo¬
sophical Association, December 29, 1957. It deals, independently
of Heidegger, with the meaning of the negative in experience,
and can thus be taken as further elucidation of the matters dis¬
cussed in Chapter 9.

284

IRRATIONAL MAN

Hail nothing, full of nothing, nothing is with

thee. . . .

The almost antiphonal repetition of “nada,” the Spanish
word for nothing, and the blasphemous transformation of
two traditional Christian prayers into invocations to this
Nothing may make the ordinary reader gag. Indeed the pas¬
sage usually provokes the stock cry of “Nihilism!”—the label
by which we seek to dismiss out of hand the kind of ex¬
perience Hemingway is reporting. But in its context the pas¬
sage is in no way sensational; in rhythm and tone it fits in
perfectly with the whole story, which though brief (eight
pages) is one of Hemingway’s best and one of his most
courageous too, for in it he names the presence that had
circulated, unnamed and unconfronted, through and be¬
hind much of his earlier writing. The passage itself only
names what the story as a whole work of art reveals: the
presence that Hemingway and his hero experience—a pres¬
ence that is fully as real as the lights and shadows of the
caf6, and the solid objects in it, tables, chairs, and human
bodies—is Nothing.

It is at this that the philosophic reader is likely to gag.
Can this Nothing really be a datum? The question of what
is and what is not given in experience is a thorny one; and
though philosophers today may admit it is thornier than
they used to imagine, they are likely to slam the door pretty
sharply against the kind of datum Hemingway is trying to
present. Sense-data are given, some philosophers say; per¬
ceptual objects are given, say others; but however they may
squabble among themselves over such matters, they will
end up joining forces against such a strange negative entity
as that to which Hemingway testifies here.

He is a pretty lucid witness too. His words undercut the
common objection that all that is involved here is a “mere
mood” (as if moods were mere passiones animae, modifica¬
tions inhering in a psychic substance, in the Cartesian
sense). “It was not fear or dread,” he tells us. “It was a
nothing that he knew too well.” Fear and dread are moods;
but what is in question for the character in the story is

NEGATION, FINmiDE, AND NATURE OF MAN 285

not a mood, but a presence that he knows and knows all
too well. So far as the mood of Hemingway’s story is con¬
cerned, it is in no way frantic, despairing, or “nihilistic.”
Rather, its tone is one of somber and clear courage.

As a matter of fact, human moods and reactions to the
encounter with Nothingness vary considerably from person
to person, and from culture to culture. The Chinese Taoists
found the Great Void tranquilizing, peaceful, even joyful.
For the Buddhists in India, the idea of Nothing evoked a
mood of universal compassion for all creatures caught in
the toils of an existence that is ultimately groundless. In the
traditional culture of Japan the idea of Nothingness per¬
vades the exquisite modes of aesthetic feeling displayed in
painting, architecture, and even the ceremonial rituals of
daily life. But Western man, up to his neck in things, ob¬
jects, and the business of mastering them, recoils with
anxiety from any possible encounter with Nothingness and
labels talk of it as “negative”—which is to say, morally rep¬
rehensible. Clearly, then, the moods with which men react
to this Nothing vary according to time, place, and cultural
conditioning; but what is at issue here is not the mood with
which one ought to confront such a presence, but the
reality of the presence itself.

It is now a good many years since Husserl set forth the
motto, “Zu den Sachen selbst,” “To the things themselves,”
as an exhortation to philosophers to bring themselves closer
to the sources of experience. To do so is very hard for phi¬
losophers: they come to experience with too many intel¬
lectual preconceptions. Artists are better at it. It is, after
all, what the artist is paid to do: to be attentive to experi¬
ence. If Hemingway had read Heidegger, or if he were
Jean-Paul Sartre, writing his story out of some intellectual
parti pris, then his testimony in this case would be suspect,
at least initially. But Hemingway is not an intellectual, far
from it; and the unique style he has forged for himself—a
style which at the period of this story had not yet begun
to parody itself—sprang from an urge to report truly, to set
things straight for the reader, to get, in Husserl’s phrase, to
the things themselves. He is at the outset a credible witness.

286

IRRATIONAL MAN

Artist and thinker have stood in hidden opposition since
the very dawn of Western philosophy. Plato’s condemna¬
tion of Homer was, in the end, not so much moral as meta¬
physical, as Plato himself acknowledged. The truth the
artist reveals eludes the conceptual structure of the philoso¬
pher. Hence it is no truth, for the latter, but untruth. (In
the very late dialogue, The Sophist, Plato, as we may re¬
member, classes the poets with the Sophists as merchants
of non-Being.) There is, however, another approach open
to the philosopher: In the face of the recalcitrant data set
forth by the artist, the thinker may choose to let thought
rethink itself, to let it stand in more open and living con¬
tact with what is given. Hemingway’s story may seem a
tiny thing to pit against the central tradition of Western
thought, but one has to take the experience of the real
where one finds it; genuine witnesses to experience are so
few and far between that we cannot afford not to listen
to one, even at the discomfort of having to think in a way
that is unfamiliar to us. And a breach anywhere in the
traditional way of thinking, in this case about the negative,
may lead us to re-examine that tradition wholly.

1 .

In Metaphysics, Delta, 7, Aristotle lists, among others,
the following meanings of Being, to on, that-which-is:

(1) Being is that which is divided by the ten categories
[i.e., that which is is either a substance, or a quality
(of a substance), or a quantity (of a substance),
or a relation (of substances), etc.].

(2) Being is that which signifies the truth of a propo¬
sition.

Medieval thinkers (and I believe they were quite ac¬
curate in their reading of Aristotle) made this passage the
basis for a distinction between (1) ens reale, real Being,
and (2) ens rationis, conceptual Being. (1) The first term
defines a real entity as that which has actual and positive
existence as an object in the world—ultimately, a primary

NEGATION, FINITUDE, AND NATURE OF MAN 287

substance or one of its attributes or relations, (a) The sec¬
ond sense includes entities that do not have real and positive
existence in the first sense. Thus, if I can assert a true propo¬
sition about a non-existing thing, then in some sense it has
Being, since it is not a pure non-entity. “A centaur is half
man, half horse” is a true proposition; and obviously a
centaur is an entity of some kind, though not a really ex¬
istent one. A centaur is an entity about which at least one
true proposition may be uttered. Since propositions do not
exist without minds to interpret them, the centaur is an ens
rationis—a conceptual or mental entity.

In the light of this distinction, the medieval tradition
treats all negative entities (including privations) as entia
rationis, conceptual entities. The example of a privation
used by St. Thomas is blindness. Blindness is not an ens
reale; the eye is real, and the cataract or other substance
that may grow over it to cause blindness is real; but the
blindness itself, the not-seeing, is an entity only in the sense
that the proposition “The eye does not see” is true—that is,
asserts what is the case if we happen to be talking about
a blind man.

Perhaps the cogency of this position may be made
clearer by another illustration. I remove everything from my
table top except a stone paperweight. Both the table and
the stone are real entities, things that have actual and posi¬
tive existence. Now, the following is true:

(1) There is a stone on the table.

If I now remove the stone from the table, the following be¬
comes true:

(2) The stone is not on the table,

or:

(2') The stone is absent from the table.

The absence of the stone is a fact; but this means nothing
more than that the preceding propositions (2) and (2')
are true. If I took to groping around on the table to lay
hold of this absence-of-stone, I would be making a fool of
myself both practically and intellectually. The absence-of-

288

IRRATIONAL MAN

the-stone-from-the-table is an entity that exists only in the
mind: I have seen the stone on the table, I expect it to be
there and it is not, and I think: The stone is not now on
the table.

Here common sense speaks in all its luminous simplicity.
This way of thought, laid down by Aristotle in his Meta¬
physics and continued by the Schoolmen, was the frame¬
work within which the seventeenth-century founders of
modem philosophy still thought. It is today the persistent
and consistent tradition within which Western man thinks
about Being and its negatives. It is remarkable that Camap,
in an essay published in Erkennis in 1931 (“The Conquest
of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Lan¬
guage”), seeking to show that Heidegger’s conception of
Das Nichts, Nothing, follows from a misuse of language,
still follows the argument of the preceding paragraph.
Camap makes use of the logistical apparatus, but the es¬
sential direction of his thinking is the same as that of St.
Thomas in the opening pages of De Ente et Essentia. At
first glance, Camap and St. Thomas may seem very strange
bedfellows, but on second thought we should not be sur¬
prised; Positivism belongs, after all, to the Western tradi¬
tion, and when it thinks about Being, or systematically
avoids thinking about it, both the thinking and the avoid¬
ance of thinking take place wholly within this tradition. But
by keeping its gaze riveted on minute logical matters that
lie in the foreground. Positivism can let these preconcep¬
tions sink so far into the background that they can be for¬
gotten and even denied to be there.

But common sense, however logical and sound, is after
all only one human attitude among many others; and like
everything human it may have its limitations—or negative
side. No matter how massive this tradition that locates real
Being exclusively in the positively existing object, we must
be ready to put it to the phenomenological test of our own
experience, however humble or grubby.

Let us see, then, about this blindness:

One fine morning a man wakes up blind. One day we
are bom, one day we die; one day, for some people, we go

NEGATION, FINTTUDE, AND NATURE OF MAN 289

blind. Perhaps, in fact, we should not say “a man.” The
term removes this man, at the outset, into a more remote
realm of objects, where his personal being is shed drop by
drop like a face losing contour at a distance. I, you, go—
this man goes blind. That is better, for it suggests a little
more that this is happening to some single human person.
Well, then, this man has suddenly gone blind. He has fallen
into a great black pit, his whole life has been swallowed
up in a darkness. Non-seeing, a privation, has descended on
him with more crushing effect than a brick from a rooftop.
Roaring with anguish, he crashes and stumbles about his
room. A doctor arrives and examines his eyes. If the doctor
philosophizes in the manner of Aristotle, St. Thomas, or
Camap, he will observe: the eyes are real, and the growth
over the eyes is a real substance, but the non-seeing of the
eye is itself not an object and therefore not an ens reale,
a real entity. And if doctors still know Latin or if this one
has a slight touch of Moliere, he may even pompously and
soothingly quote St. Thomas: “Caecitas non habet esse in
rebus” (Blindness has no being in things). For my part, I
rather hope this doctor is not able to get out of the room
fast enough to avoid the blind man’s fury. His language, for
all its Latin gravity, is humanly frivolous; and what is
humanly frivolous ought to be somehow and somewhere
philosophically wrong too.

What, so far as philosophy is concerned, is happening
in this situation? Nothing less than this: In the traditional
way of thought a chasm has opened between subject and
object, between Being considered as that-which-is, a posi¬
tively existing object, and Being as the mode of being of a
subject; blindness observed from without and blindness ex¬
perienced from within. For the man who has gone blind
his blindness may very well be the ens realissimum— or,
more accurately, the esse or non-esse realissimum— of his
life.

Here, in the tradition, two notions—negativity and sub¬
jectivity—have become essentially linked, with the latter ac¬
corded at most a derivative and questionable status. That
mode of thought which perpetually stands outside and

290

IRRATIONAL MAN

looks for the object cannot bring into thought the subjec¬
tivity of the subject. This subjectivity of the subject has
nothing to do with “subjectivism” in any of the skeptical
forms that have bedeviled modem philosophy since Des¬
cartes. The subjectivity of the subject is a reality within the
world. The world contains stones, plants, animals, planets,
stars—and also subjects living out their own subjectivity.

Human finitude is the presence of the not in the being of
man. That mode of thought which cannot understand nega¬
tive existence cannot fully understand human finitude. Fini¬
tude is a matter of human limitations, and limitations in¬
volve what we cannot do or can not be. Our finitude,
however, is not the mere sum of our limitations; rather, the
fact of human finitude brings us to the center of man, where
positive and negative existence coincide and interpenetrate
to such an extent that a man’s strength coincides with his
pathos, his vision with his blindness, his truth with his un¬
truth, his being with his non-being. And if human finitude
is not understood, neither is the nature of man.

2 .

Traditional ontology has always been carried out in con¬
nection with theology, and in the actual systems in the West
this has always meant theodicy, a justification of the per¬
fection of God and His universe. The classical theory of
privations fits into this historical frame. It was in fact linked
with the effort to solve the problem of evil, which is why,
though the theory exists in germ in Aristotle, it was elabo¬
rated fully only by the later Christian Aristotelians. If evil
is essentially negative in nature, a privatio boni or privation
of the good, and if privations have only mental and not
real being, then evil becomes an illusory shadow, expunged
from the perfection of God’s universe. So the seed was
planted from which grew the tradition of making negative
existence into a reality that is sublimated, mediated, aufge-
hoben, or otherwise made to disappear by a metaphysical
trick of passe-passe. The human motives for the ontological
prejudice are thus abundantly clear.

NEGATION, FINITUDE, AND NATURE OF MAN 2 Q 1

But this prejudice was, in turn, to provide the main out¬
line for the theory of human nature. If we take as repre¬
sentative of this tradition Aristotle’s treatment of man in the
Ethics (and elsewhere in his works), St. Thomas’ De
Hamine, Descartes’ Treatise on the Passions, Spinoza on
the emotions, then the unity of these thinkers begins to ap¬
pear, to us today, much more significant than their diver¬
gences, however considerable. For all of them, man is an
object, one object amid that hierarchy of objects that is
nature; an object, moreover, with a fixed nature or essence
that assigns him his precise place in that hierarchy, which
latter, perfect though it may be, depends in turn upon the
plenitude of God’s being. Whatever any of these thinkers
wrote about man was, then, simply the product of an ex¬
ceptional intelligence reasoning about the essence of an
object; none of this reasoning required—and indeed showed
no trace of—that fateful and sometimes dreadful experience
which we know as the encounter with the Self. Each of
them could have written exactly as he did if he had only
thought and never lived. This, at least, cannot be said
against Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—which may be one very
good reason why contemporary thinking about man will
have to start from these two.

Idealism might seem to have been a great exception to
this general tradition, since it brought subjectivity into phi¬
losophy, giving it a role that it had not previously had in
Western thought. But the “subject” that idealism intro¬
duced into philosophy was only the epistemological sub¬
ject, not the concrete human subject: it was the mind, that
is, with its restrictive conditions for the formation of con¬
cepts and systems, not the concrete person in the radical
finitude of his existence. And idealism ended by becoming
objective idealism, the adjective revealing that the ultimate
concern was once again with the nature of the object, with
ens rather than with esse. The root of idealism’s difference
with materialism remained unchanged; it was content
merely with turning the tables on its adversary and finding
the nature of the object to be mind-stuff rather than matter-
stuff. Hegel appears to be dealing with negativity and

292

IRRATIONAL MAN

finitude, to a greater extent than any philosopher before
him; certainly he flaunts the terms, at least. But it was only
flaunting. Hegel was in the end the most arrogant spokes¬
man for the classical tradition, since everything negative,
fragmentary, incomplete, partial—in a word, human—gets
transfigured in his System and is absorbed into the plenitude
of the Absolute. The image of man that Hegel projects is
a glorified one, perhaps, but it is also a travesty of our
actual human experience, and therefore, finally, insulting.

But surely, it may be said, this tradition is no longer
powerful or operative; we live in a non-metaphysical, or
even anti-metaphysical age, and there is no need to expend
energy flogging a dead horse. Habits of thought are per¬
sistent things, however, and retain their identity through
many strange metamorphoses. Those who would interpret
man as an object of one kind or another seem to find a kin¬
ship that crosses all philosophical boundaries. Thus it is re¬
ported that some Jesuits have got together with Communist
philosophers on the other side of the Iron Curtain, to seek
a rapprochement between Marxism and Thomism. No
doubt, each side secretly thinks it will devour the other;
but it is significant that St. Thomas may be digestible to
Communism where Kierkegaard would be absolute anath¬
ema; these Communist philosophers repudiate any attempt
to deal philosophically with human subjectivity, as being
a symptom of bourgeois decadence. On this side of the Cur¬
tain, in America, the vogue is rather to interpret man from
the point of view of the behavioral sciences, in the light of
scientific objectivity: man is no longer reduced to a meta¬
physical object, as in the classical tradition, but to a
scientific object. Nineteenth-century naturalism attempted
to give us man as a physicochemical object; and as natu¬
ralistic thought has become more flexible and subtle, in this
century, we have had successively man as a biological ob¬
ject, as a biologicosocial object, as an anthropological ob¬
ject, and now, with some of the younger generation of
naturalists, man as a psychoanalytic object.

There seem to me two objections—one practical, one in
principle—to the attempt to interpret man in his totality
from the point of view of the behavioral sciences. First,

NEGATION, FINITUDE, AND NATURE OF MAN 293

these sciences are as yet very youthful, and very poorly
provided with reliable general conclusions. If, honoring the
requirements of the severely scientific conscience, we re¬
strict ourselves to the reliable results now afforded by these
sciences, we shall have a picture of only a tiny fragment
of man. And while we wish very much that these sciences
may develop, in the meantime we have to five, and this
means that we must be guided by some general idea of
what man is all about. Every age, as Andre Malraux has
shown, projects its own image of man in its art; and even
if it has no art, it will live by such an image, sometimes
expressed but more often veiled. If the philosopher hands
over to the behavioral sciences the task of philosophical
anthropology, it does not mean that he is without any total
image of man, but only that the image is more likely to be
unconscious. When philosophers today deal with human
matters, as in ethics, even though they are apparently only
doing so through the logical analysis of value statements, I
think it can always be shown that there are, concealed
within the analysis, presuppositions as to the nature of man.

The second objection—one of principle—to the view of
the behavioral sciences is that they must be perpetually in¬
complete. From what has been established in our time
about the incompleteness of mathematics, the most rigor¬
ous of all the sciences, we know that such vague and com¬
plex amalgams (not yet systems) as the behavioral sciences
can never even pretend to completeness; consequently man
as a totality will always elude their grasp. Any attempt to
interpret man completely from the view of these sciences
is bound to be reductive in nature.

Indeed, it is hard for even the most well-intentioned of
sociologists and anthropologists to avoid slipping into such
a reduction—as we can see whenever they are led to gen¬
eralize about more complex social entities, such as, say,
American civilization, whose meaning is part of our own
subjectivity. The primitives, if they could read what the
anthropologists say about them, might have the same dif¬
ficulty in recognizing themselves. The problem is especially
acute, in fact, when the behavioral scientists are dealing
with primitives who have risen to the level of producing

294

IRRATIONAL MAN

great art, such as Benin and Bantu sculpture. These primi¬
tive artists already occupy a domain of being that we can
enter only as art, and whose meaning we cannot grasp so
long as we stand outside it and systematically catalogue ob¬
jects, artifacts, and materials. The one science of man that
has attempted anything like an understanding of the total
human personality is psychoanalysis, a field that must be
distinguished from its suspicious neighbor, academic psy¬
chology, which restricts itself to a relatively tiny part of
man’s being. But it is psychoanalysis that has undergone
violent cleavages into schools and is currently experiencing
the deepest crisis over fundamentals, a crisis that has in the
end to be evaluated by philosophy since its issues are
philosophical, a principal one—that between Freud, Adler,
and Jung—being precisely the nature and scope of human
subjectivity.

More important, however, than any of the theories of
man held by philosophers is the actual image of man in
terms of which the historical epoch lives and plays out its
destiny. Such an image of man may be derived in part from
the theories of philosophers, but more often than not it is
the product of historical forces that tend to be unconscious
because they are so massive. The phenomena of mass
society and the collectivization of man are facts so decisive
for our age that all conflicts among political forms and
among leaders take place upon and within this basis. Col¬
lectivization proceeds by reducing man to an object in
functional interplay with other objects (men), returning
him ironically enough in some sense to his primitive status
as a natural object in use, from which history long ago dis¬
entangled him. Collective being is becoming the style of our
epoch, despite our Sunday-morning lip service to the ideals
of the dignity and value of the individual. Subjectivity is
already considered a criminal offense under totalitarianism,
a morbid excrescence by our own Philistinism. Against such
threatening historical weather, that subjectivity takes on
the human dignity of revolt; the reality of the negative
shows itself in man’s power to say No.

EXISTENCE AND ANALYTIC
PHILOSOPHERS

Appendix II

That existence is not a genuine predicate has been one of
the more entrenched dogmas of Positivism and Analytic
Philosophy; yet in some quarters recently the question
seems to have been reopened. The question indeed deserves
a fresh look on the part of analytic philosophers; and for
this purpose we may as well begin with the classical state¬
ment on the matter given by Kant in his Critique of Pure
Reason—a. statement that has seemed decisive for most
modem philosophers after him.

“Being,” Kant says, “is evidently not a real predicate, or
a concept of something that can be added to the concept
of a thing.” That is: if I think of a thing and then think of
that same thing as existing, my second concept does not
add any observable property to the first, and therefore—so
far as its conceptual or strictly representative content is con¬
cerned—I am thinking the same thought in both cases. The
existing thing and the merely possible thing are, qua
thing, one and the same. And Kant’s example here has be¬
come quite as famous as his declaration of general princi¬
ple: the concept of a hundred real dollars, he tells us, and
of a hundred merely possible dollars are, as concepts, one
and the same—there is not one cent more or less in the
one than the other. The concept, as such, is existentially
neutral.

It is worth while to pause for a moment over this rather
remarkable example, which is quite typical of the candor
with which this great thinker is often likely to bring up as

296 irrational man

examples just those that are most embarrassing to the case
he would like to establish. For here he has chosen a most
pointedly existential illustration—at least for most of us who
at one time or another have felt the abysmal difference be¬
tween real and merely possible dollars when we have put
our hand into our pocket to find it unexpectedly and em¬
barrassingly empty. Kant is candid enough to admit this
fact: “In my financial position,” he says, “no doubt there
exists more by one hundred dollars than by their concept
only.” But why this grudging concession to the earthy fact
of one’s financial position, almost by way of incidental
footnote, as if money were something that had only a very
accidental relation to one’s financial position and were not
essentially something that has to do with making us richer
or poorer—richer by its existence in our pockets and poorer
by its absence? The ordinary citizen, who feels the pinch
of meeting bills and knows very well the difference between
a hundred merely possible dollars (of which he may
dream) and a hundred real dollars (which he is hard put
to scrape together), might be provoked—and just by the
very homeliness of Kant’s example—to exclaim that if the
concepts of philosophers allow no difference between a hun¬
dred real dollars and a hundred merely possible dollars,
then so much the worse for the concepts of philosophers! A
human retort which would also seem to be not without its
own philosophic depth.

Kant’s contention, however, is readily understandable in
terms of his general doctrine in the Critique as to what is
required of a really legitimate concept. Such a concept
must be capable of being represented according to some
schema of the imagination: the concept (if it is not to be
empty) must bind together a series of mental images, thus
ultimately of sensory data which are the sources of those
images. In his doctrine of the schemata Kant was systema¬
tizing the view of the nature of the concept which had
appeared in British Empiricism with Berkeley’s famous ob¬
jection to “abstract ideas” and from there had passed down
to Kant through Hume. The concept here is, ultimately,
a mental picture of a sensory datum—either directly or

EXISTENCE AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHERS 297

through a logical chain of concepts constructed from other
concepts which are such mental pictures. In this sense,
surely, we have to agree with Kant that we can have no
mental picture of the existence of a thing. In forming the
concept of a table, I can represent to myself its color, size,
shape, etc., but not its existence. All of these—color, size,
shape, etc.—are what philosophers nowadays call observa¬
ble properties; and the existence of the table is not one of
these properties. To be sure, if there were not actually ex¬
isting tables, we would not be able to sense these observa¬
ble properties, and from there proceed to form a mental
picture of a table that is indifferently an actual or a pos¬
sible table. However, this fact is allowed to lurk like an
unmentioned and unpleasant ghost in the background of
the whole Kantian discussion, turning up some very pretty
puzzles elsewhere in the Critique, and eventually landing
him in that impasse—the scandal of philosophy, as he him¬
self calls it—of being unable to provide any proof of the
reality of the external world.

Thus Kant’s position that existence is not a predicate be¬
longs to the more explicitly empiricist side of his philosophy,
a very considerable side too of Kantianism in which it has
shaped later Positivism and Pragmatism much more than
Positivists and Pragmatists sometimes seem to remember.
His target here, moreover, is perfectly clear—and in philo¬
sophical disputes it is imperative for the philosopher to
know what he is really after if the dispute is not to lose
itself in the bewildering detail of perfectly pointless dialec¬
tic: Kant wants to get rid of existence as a predicate in
order to demolish the arguments for the existence of God.
Later Empiricists and analysts who have followed him in
this point have been concerned with a similar, but more
general, aim: that of undermining metaphysics altogether;
for if existence is an empty concept, then metaphysicians
who have talked about it have been talking nonsense. Of
course, philosophers have talked a great deal of nonsense
about existence, and to expose this nonsense is a laudable
aim. But one need not therefore go to the extreme of taking
one’s revenge on ordinary language and the plain man by

298

IRRATIONAL MAN

casting out the word “exists” from his permissible vo¬
cabulary.

More than this: the Kantian position might be accepted,
but then put to a very different use from that of the Em¬
piricists. And this is exactly what takes place with Kierke¬
gaard, who agrees with Kant that existence is not a con¬
cept (or predicate) but from a diametrically opposite point
of view from that of the Empiricists. For the Positivist, ex¬
istence is not a concept because it is too empty, thin, and
therefore ultimately meaningless; for Kierkegaard, my ex¬
istence is not a concept because it is too dense, rich, and
concrete to be represented adequately in any mental pic¬
ture. My existence is not a mental representation but a fact
in which I am plunged up to the ears, and indeed over
the head. In that great hall of mirrors—the Kantian mind
with all its representations—the image of my existence
never appears adequately in any one of those conceptual
mirrors simply because it is the enveloping presence sur¬
rounding all those mirrors, without which they would not
be at all. Men—actual and not merely possible men—are re¬
lated to their own existence in a quite different way from
that of the understanding seeking to secure a mental repre¬
sentation: in moods of joy, or of despair, they may bless
or curse their own existence. When Hamlet in his ultimate
anxiety puts the question “To be or not to be,” the way
in which, in this question itself, he relates himself to his
own existence is not at all that of the understanding to one
of its concepts. Kierkegaard s aim here is as perfectly defi¬
nite as Kant’s, though altogether different in its implications
for philosophy: if existence cannot be a concept, then quite
clearly it cannot be reduced to essence, nor can priority
for essence over existence be claimed. Kierkegaard’s imme¬
diate target, of course, was the Hegelian attempt to reduce
existence to essence by showing the former as one stage in
the unfolding of the Dialectic; but his protest against es¬
sence in the name of existence goes quite beyond this im¬
mediate target, and in fact brings into question the whole
Platonic tradition within Western philosophy that has al¬
ways attempted to treat existence as a copy, imitation,

EXISTENCE AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHERS

299

participation in, or even a fall or descent of essence. Here
Kierkegaard points to what is really the significant issue
behind the debate about existence’s being a predicate:
what matters in the end is not whether we rig up our lan¬
guage so that “exists” is a permissible predicate or not (and
in fact it can be rigged either way); what does matter is
what we make of existence: whether we give it its due as
a primal and irreducible fact, or somehow convert it into
a shadowy stand-in for essence.

1.

On this point the Platonic inheritance is so subtly and
deeply entrenched in Western thought that its presence is
likely to be potent even where it is unconscious; a rather
striking instance of which is provided by Bertrand Russell
even in a phase of his thought when he had purportedly
thrown over his earlier Platonism. Russell sharpens the
Kantian position considerably: the proposition “Socrates ex¬
ists” becomes, for him, nonsensical because in the formal
language of his Principia Mathematica an expression of this
form is syntactically impossible. The fact that in ordinary
language the statement “Socrates exists” is perfectly under¬
standable, and indeed everybody not only understands its
meaning but knows it to be false since 399 b.c. (when
Socrates drank the hemlock), is something of an obstacle,
nevertheless, that Russell has to get around. Accordingly,
he would permit the surrogate statement “(Ex) (x=Socra-
tes),” which may be translated, “There is an individual
whose proper name is Socrates.” Here, in the effort to
get rid of existence as a predicate, we are left with the
suspiciously kindred expression, “There is.” Existence, ap¬
parently, is a rather sticky and clinging presence. Rus¬
sell’s feat begins to look a little bit like that old comic
routine of the comedian who tries frantically to throw off
a piece of flypaper from his right hand, fails, then sits down
and patiently peels it off with his left hand; at last, holds
up his empty right hand while a look of childish glee
spreads over his face; meanwhile the audience sees the

3oo

IRRATIONAL MAN

paper sticking now to the left hand. The early Wittgenstein
was one of the first to call attention to the fact that the
flypaper was still there.

Since “There is” remains in his language, Russell has to
provide an interpretation of what it means to exist; and
this he proceeds to do with great boldness, dispatch—and
simple-mindedness. Eliminating the details of symbolism,
we can boil it down to this: To exist is to satisfy a propo¬
sitional function, where “satisfy” has the same meaning as
when we say in mathematics that the roots of an equation
exist—i.e., satisfy the equation. And this is not proposed as
a mere illustrative model; on the contrary, Russell tells us,
“This is the fundamental meaning of ‘existence.’ Other
meanings are either derived from this, or embody mere con¬
fusion of thought.” Did Bertrand Russell, the man, ever be¬
lieve that he existed in the same sense in which the root of
an equation exists? I hardly think so; but the fact that
probably the most widely known philosopher of our time
can advance this view (and get away with it in philosophic
circles) would seem to indicate how far into the Kingdom
of Laputa the age itself, at any rate its analytic philoso¬
phers, have insensibly slipped.

Russell’s language here is altered from Plato, but the line
of thought is exactly the same. To exist, Plato said, is to
be a copy or likeness of the Idea, or essence. Particular
things exist to the degree that they fulfill, or satisfy , the
archetypal pattern of the Idea. To exist, says Russell, is to
satisfy a propositional function, just as a certain number
may satisfy a given equation. In both cases existence is un¬
derstood as derivative from essence. Existents exist in virtue
of essence.

Wittgenstein, following Russell, was at once bolder and
more stringent in his thinking when he protested that the
language of Russell’s Principia Mathematica did not prop¬
erly get existence out of logic. Not only does this language
permit unrestricted existential operators, but in it the prop¬
osition “(Ex) (x=x)”—“There is an individual identical
with itself”—is an analytic truth. Wittgenstein felt that logic
should not even be able to make a statement like this—let

EXISTENCE AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHEBS 301

alone its being an analytic truth. Speaking as the purist of
logic, for whom logic, pure logic, must have nothing to do
with existence and the real world, Wittgenstein was un¬
doubtedly justified in this contention. But he was then
forced to desperate measures to get the “There is” out of
logic. If one had a world where all the atomic facts were
properly itemized, so he contended, one could simply say
“a is P” or “b is P” or “c is P,” etc., etc. (where a, b, and
c are proper names, and P is an observable property), with¬
out having to stoop to saying “There is an x that is P,”
which is only a vague and indefinite makeshift for one or
the other definite statement. Unfortunately—though per¬
haps fortunately for us as existing humans—a world of such
clear-cut atomic facts, where each individual entity is
neatly itemized under its proper name, is but the dream of
the logician, with no resemblance to the real world in which
we do exist. (Even in mathematics there are compelling
reasons why Wittgenstein’s proposal could not be adopted.)
These early proposals of Wittgenstein have by this time
pretty' well gone by the boards among analytic philoso¬
phers; but the fact that he was forced to such extreme
measures to conjure “There is” out of logic serves to suggest
again what we have seen in the case of Russell: that ex¬
istence is indeed a sticky thing, from which even the pure
logician finds it difficult to disentangle himself.

2 .

At this point we have to compound Kant’s original diffi¬
culty, or rather push it to its root, by turning from the
“There is” to the simple copula “is,” and by asking whether
this simple verb itself, merely as copula, does not have some
existential import. Kant would have the expression “S is”
be nonsense, but would find “S is P” acceptable. But what
if the “is” in “S is P” were more than a mere sign of the
joining of predicate to subject, but also signified existence
in some way or other? This aspect of the problem Kant
did not at all develop. Modem mathematical logic dis¬
penses with the “is” of predication, usually employing

302

IRRATIONAL MAN

parentheses for the job—thus “a is P” becomes “P(a)”—
and this latter syntactical form suggests that the “is” of
ordinary language is no more than an auxiliary symbol with
no more meaning than the parentheses used as the formal
sign of predication. Still, it is not quite certain that the “is”
of ordinary language has only this sense; and indeed if we
consult the Oxford Dictionary, we find that it lists six senses
of the verb “to be” before it arrives at its meaning as a
simple copula! No doubt, for the formal logician this is
merely a grubby and earth-bound fact of historical usage,
and of no particular significance for philosophic under¬
standing; but since we happen also to be dealing here with
the grubby and earth-bound fact of existence, we might at
least let this fact of historical usage cut as much weight, at
least prima facie, as the formal constructions of logicians.

One effort to dispense with the copula occurred in the
famous episode in earlier Positivism about protocol sen¬
tences (here again the original impetus came from Witt¬
genstein) : if instead of “This table is brown” we report
the supposedly more basic datum “Here now a brown
patch,” we have got rid of the copula “is.” And with an
ample class of such protocol statements, together with the
apparatus of formal logic, which does not employ the cop¬
ula “is,” we should be able to deal with the world of our
experience without any of that metaphysical nonsense that
in the past has attached itself to the verb “to be” and has
made the sheer accident of its usage an occasion for
philosophers to expatiate on the meaning of existence. So,
at any rate, earlier Positivism proposed.

Now, the issue is not the sacrosanct character of the verb
“to be,” and we would be quite content to jettison it if that
would help matters; but in appearing to jettison it we have
to be sure that we do not make another verbal form do its
work. And in this last respect, “Here now” is an extremely
suspicious expression; for one could hardly find another in
the language that more vividly signifies the immediate,
actual, enveloping present state of affairs—existence, in
short. Where the temporal reference is thus insisted upon
there certainly some thin g is said about existence. To elim-

EXISTENCE AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHERS 303

mate any existential reference one would have to eliminate
the tense of the verb. Thus in the logical form “P(a)”—to
be read, “P of a”—the assertion is temporally neutral, or
timeless; “Brown (this table)”—“Brown of this table”—does
not tell me when it is, was, or will be brown; whereas,
“This table is brown” indicates that this brown table is a
present existing fact. So, too, in languages like Russian and
Greek the verb for “to be” can be omitted as a copula in
the present tense; but the omission is possible because the
tense is clearly understood; when other tenses are signified,
the verb for “to be” has to be used.

It might seem possible to eliminate present-past-future
by signifying time through some numerical designation that
would be temporally neutral. To say “at ten o’clock” is not
to say that ten o’clock is past, present, or future. Thus the
next step of Positivism beyond its earlier stage of protocol
sentences was to assign predicates to space-time co-ordi¬
nates: instead of “Here now a a brown patch,” with its
obvious present and existential reference, we have “Brown
(x,y)”—“A brown patch at space-time point x,y.” A numer¬
ical designation of time abstracts from the tense of the
verb. Thus we would seem to arrive at a perfectly non-
existential language of pure nouns and adjectives without
any verbs.

But this proposal would work only if there were fixed
points in an absolute Newtonian space and time that could
be known independently of the events or actual bodies that
are found at those space-time points. In fact, however, we
always have to set up physical space co-ordinates in rela¬
tion to some existing body (the earth, sun, or what not);
and time co-ordinates in relation to some actual event,
which as actual was once present, or is so now, or will be.
A language purely of nouns and adjectives would thus bor¬
row whatever temporal meanings it still preserves from a
language which had genuine verbs. But a genuine verb is
one with tenses, and therefore with an essential reference
to time; and with time, there is an inexpugnable reference
to existence.

304

IRRATIONAL MAN

3 -

To sum up: The question—debated by modem philoso¬
phers since Kant—whether existence is or is not a predicate
conceals another and historically more momentous question
for philosophy: the question namely of existence and es¬
sence, and their relation. The denial of existence as a gen¬
uine predicate belongs—in the case of most philosophers—
to that impulse of the philosophic mind which loves the
static and timeless self-identity of essence, and would con¬
strue existence as some kind of shadowy derivative of these
latter. The effort to transcend the primary fact of existence
takes, as we have seen, three forms, of which the denial of
existence is perhaps least radical: the second is to cast out
the existential operator, “There is,” from a properly logical
language; the third, to reduce the meaning of the verb “to
be” to a mere copula, an auxiliary symbol signifying that
predicate and subject are somehow joined. And it has been
this last that brought us to the hidden root of the whole
question: the meaning of “to be.”

The verb with its tense retains an essential reference to
the existential. In this respect, “to be” is the verb of verbs,
since it expresses the primary fact that makes a verb a verb
and not some other part of speech: the pure fact of being
present, or of having been past, or of going to be future
—and without any accompanying secondary and observable
action. The paradoxical fact, however, is that in one range
of usage “to be” is precisely the verb that can lose its es¬
sential temporality. We say “7 is a prime number”; and it
is nonsense to say “7 was a prime number,” or “7 will be
a prime number.” The present tense figures here as a de¬
generate case of temporality. But it is just this degenerate
case—where “is” loses all temporal sense and serves as mere
copula—that the logician is apt to take as the primary case,
from which all other meanings of “to be” are then to be
understood.

That our argument has come finally to turn on the tense
of the verb, and therefore on time and the temporal as the
inexpugnable feature of existence, is no novelty but in fact

EXISTENCE AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHERS 305

returns us to the original source of this problem in history:
returns us to Plato, for whom the derivation of existence
from essence was the human project of an escape from the
temporal into the timeless. To be sure, modem analytic
philosophers—since they are anti-metaphysicians—have no
Platonic realm of essences. But Platonism—as that funda¬
mental mode of thought which is compelled always to rate
essence over existence—may be ejected with great show
from the front door only to creep back invisibly by the
rear. So long as logic is given absolute pre-eminence in
philosophy, and the logical mind placed first in the hier¬
archy of human functions, reason seems inevitably caught
up in the fascination of static and self-identical essence,
and existence tends to become an elusive and shadowy
matter, as the history of philosophy abundantly confirms.
So far as he logicizes, man tends to forget existence. It hap¬
pens, however, that he must first exist in order to logicize.

INDEX

Absolute, the, go, 155, 204,
247, 292

Adler, Alfred, 199, 255, 258,
294

Aeschylus, 79, 276, 278, 280
Aesthetic attitude, Kierke¬
gaard’s treatment of, 163-65
Anna Karenina, 141, 142
Anxiety: in Heidegger’s philos¬
ophy, 221, 226; in Sartre’s
philosophy, 246
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 26, 27,

55, 100, 101, 102, 106, 113,
118, 170, 171, 244, 287, 288;
and Communism, 292; as ex¬
istentialist, 104, 107, 108;
quoted, 212

Aristotle, 50, 55, 77, 80, 81, 82,
86, 87, 88, 93, 95, 99, 100,
117, 118, 220; on Being,
286-87; quoted, 89
Arnold, Matthew, 69-73 P«ss.,
77 , 78, 79

Art, Greek evaluation of, 85,
88, 90

Art, modem, 41, 42, 43, 45;
and break with classical tra¬
dition, 47, 56, 57, 58, 63-64;
content of, 44, 59, 60; and
existential philosophy, 63;
flattening in, 4g, 50, 56, 58;
image of man lacking in, 61;
new forms acquired by,
46 f.; Nothingness as theme
in, 62, 63; primitivism in,
132; subjectivity of, 49
Art, Oriental, 47, 48, 54, 55,

56 , 58

Atheism: and Existentialism,
17; and Heidegger, 209; of
Nietzsche, 184, 185, 186; of
Russell, 185, 186; of Sartre,
185, 209, 243, 244, 262, 263
Attack upon Christendom, The,
172, 173, 174

Bacon, Francis, 203
Baudelaire, 130, 133, 255, 256
Beckett, Samuel, 63, 183
Being, 4, 53, 90, 103, 107, 110,
119, 130, 131, 185, 231; and
Aristotle’s conception of
First Cause, 89; Aristotle on
meanings of, 286-87; chain
of, in Western rationalism,
57, 64, 91; and death, in
Heidegger’s philosophy, 225,
226; estrangement from, 207,
208; Field Theory of, 217,
218, 219, 221, 224; and
Hegelian dialectic, 160;
Heidegger on, 207, 208,
210-13, 217-27 pass., 230-
37 pass., 248, 249, 251; Kant
quoted on, 161; not reached
by conceptual reason, 235;
in Oriental philosophy, 231,
234, 237; Plato’s identifica¬
tion of, with Ideas, 85; po¬
etry as means of arriving at,
130; and Positivism, 210,
288; preconceptual under¬
standing of, 213; and primi¬
tivism, 132 f.; and Romanti¬
cism, 123, 126; in Sartre’s
philosophy, 245, 246, 248,
251, 254, 257, 258; tradi¬
tional belief in intelligibil¬
ity of, 55, 64; truth as open¬
ness toward, 143; as Will to
Power, 199, 200
Being and Nothingness, 246,
249, 252, 254, 258
Being and Some Philosophers,
106

Being and Time, 40, 211, 225,
235

Berdyaev, Nikolai, 15, 136,
173 , 178, 236
Bergson, Henri, 14,15, 114
Between Man and Man, 236

INDEX

308

Beyond Good and Evil, 200
Bible, 71, 72, 76, 168
Blake, 124, 125, 129, 190
Brothers Karamazov, The, 137-
38, 141, 193

Buber, Martin, 16, 17, 73, 236
Buddhism, 247, 285

Camus, Albert, 8
Capitalism, 27, 28, 29, 33
Carnap, 288, 289
Catholic Church, moral theol¬
ogy of, 168
Cezanne, 48, 56, 57
Christianity, 13, 110, 118, 129,
138, 183; Aristotle assimi¬
lated by, 89; faith as basis
of, 92 ff.; and Kierkegaard,
150, 151. t52. 160, 172-77
pass., 207. See also Catholic
Church; Protestantism
Civilization and Its Discon¬
tents, 178

Coleridge, 124, 125, 126, 128,
130; and Existentialism, 127
Communism, 273, 292; advent
of, in Russia, 134; appeal of,
to underdeveloped countries,
202; and Hegel, 238; Sartre’s
relations with, 262. See also
Marxism

Complementarity, Principle of,
38

Concept of Dread, The, 29,226
Concluding Unscientific Post¬
script, 156

Confessions, St. Augustine’s,
95 . 96, 97 , ioi

Consciousness: in Cartesian-
ism, 243, 248; in Sartre’s
philosophy, 245, 248
Copula “is, 302
Crime and Punishment, 137
Critique of Pure Reason , 295,
296, 297

Cubism, 48, 49, 50, 57
Culture and Anarchy, 69

Dadaists, 46
Damiani, Peter, 99, 118
Dante, 25, 27, 56, 111, 253
Dasein, 218, 220, 221, 237
De Came Christi, 94
Death: Heidegger’s analysis of,
225, 226; question of, as
central to religion, 176; Tol¬
stoy quoted on, 145
Death of Ivan Ilyich, The, 136,
141, *43

Defection: An Ode, 127
Descartes, 106, 114, 203, 216,
217, 219, 231, 232, 242, 243,
244, 248, 249, 256, 261, 263,
291

Despair, studied by Kierke¬
gaard, 169

Detachment, as Greek ideal,
76, 77

Dewey, John, 7, 19-20
Dialectic, Hegelian, 160, 298
Dionysus, 178, 179, 183, 184,
186

Divine Comedy, 25, 56, 111
Doctor Faustus, 129
Dominicans, 105, 106
Dostoevski, 15, 135-41 pass.,
174 , 175 , 193 . 194 . 199 , 244
Doubt, of Descartes, 242-43
Dread, analyzed by Kierke¬
gaard, 127

Dubuffet, quoted, 57-58

EcceHomo, 181,183,185,196
Eckhart, Meister, 14
Eliot, T. S., 50, 124, 175
Empiricism, British, 18, 296
Enlightenment, 22, 26, 27, 33,
84, 118, 134, 135, 139, 186,
227, 272-76 pass., 279
Epicureanism, 163
Essence: and Cartesian God,
244; in Greek philosophy,
76, 77, 85, 103 f.; and rela¬
tion to existence, 102-10
pass., 298, 300, 305

INDEX

309

Essentialism, 104

Ethics, Aristotle’s, 100, 113,

291

Ethics: Kierkegaard’s treat¬
ment of, 165-67; and Nietz¬
sche, 191

Eumenides, 277

Existence, and relation to es¬
sence, 102-10 pass., 298,
3°o, 305

Existentialism, 4, 110, 133,
162, 173, 176, 274, 275, 276;
vs. abstraction, 18, 19, 26g;
American curiosity about, 8;
and American optimism,
10 f.; of Aquinas, St. Thomas,
104, 106, 107, 108; Being
and Time as Bible of, 211;
Bergson’s relation to, 15; and
Coleridge, 127; and Dosto¬
evski, 140; European origins
of, 11 ff., 20; existence put
before essence, 102, 104,
248; French, 7-11 pass., 14,
101, 238, 239-63; German
sources of, 11, 14; and

Hebraism, 78; and James,
William, 18-19; meaning of,
268; news of, after Second
World War, 7 f.; vs. over¬
simplified pictures of man,
22; of Pascal, 111; as philos¬
ophy of atomic age, 65; and
Plato, 80, 86; and Pragma¬
tism, 19; reaction to, by pro¬
fessional philosophers, g, 10;
and religion, 17-18; Rug-
gieri’s description of, 216;
Russian, White, 15-16; of St.
Augustine, 95; Spanish con¬
tributions to, 16; tensions
expressed by, 26; of Tertul-
lian, 94; themes of, 36; of
Tolstoy, 141. See also Hei¬
degger; Kierkegaard; Nietz¬
sche; Sartre

Facticity, 109

Faith, and reason, 92-101, 111
Farewell to Arms, A, 44
Faulkner, 50, 52, 53, 56, 269
Faust, 128 f., 130, 189, 190
Fear and Trembling, 151, 153,
166

Finitude, 290; in Heidegger’s
philosophy, 226, 227, 238,
275

Flies, The, 252
Forster, E. M., 54, 55
Freud, 138, 178, 199, 255, 294
Furies, 276-79 pass.

Genealogy of Morals, 191
Gilson, Etienne, 106, 107
God: attributes of, 105; death
of, 182, 185, 186, 203, 209,
237 , 238, 244; as First
Cause, 89; as highest object
of knowledge, 90; proofs of
existence unsatisfactory to
Pascal, 116-17; reality of,
concreteness of, 186
Godel, 38, 39, 40
Goethe, 127-30 pass., 189, 190
Gorky, Maxim, 144, 145
Greek philosophy, 5, 71, 72,
76, 77 , 79-91 pass., 230,
231, 234. See also Hellenism
Gulliver’s Travels, 120-23 pass.

Hebraism, 70-73 pass., 76-79
pass., 110

Hegel, 39, 82, 96, 97, 158-61
pass., 227, 238, 246, 247,
273, 291, 292

Heidegger, Martin, 11, 12, 17,
40, 53, 63, 107, 110, 115,
117, 125, 136, 141, 143, 172,
205; as academic philos¬
opher, 207; on anxiety, 221,
226; on Being, 207, 208,
210-13, 217-27 pass., 230-
37 pass., 248, 249, 251; on
conscience, 252; and criti-

310

INDEX

cism of Heideggerian man,
236; and Das Nichts, 288;
and Dasein, 218, 220, 221,
237; on death, 225, 226; and
death of God, 209, 237, 238;
etymological studies by, 214,
215, 216; existentialia of,
220-24; on finitude of exist¬
ence, 226, 227, 238, 275; on
history, 229, 230, 238; vs.
Kierkegaard, 237, 238; on
Nietzsche, 197, 207, 209,
232, 233; and “the One,”
219-20, 225; peasant stock
of. 208; and phenomenol¬
ogy, 213, 214, 215; quoted,
206, 209; and Sartre, 238,
242, 248-49 pass.; and time,
theory of, 227-28; on truth,
meaning of, 230, 231
Heisenberg, 38, 40
Hellenism, 70, 72, 77, 79
Hemingway, Ernest, 46, 269,
284, 285, 286; quoted, 44-
45, 62, 283
Heraclitus, 81
Holderin, 125, 209, 237
Hubris, 40, 279
Humanism, 60; in European
universities, 6; Marxist, 273;
of Sartre, 249-50
Hume, David, 18, 217, 219,
296

Husserl, Edmund, 11, 12, 41,
108, 213, 214, 216, 285

I and Thou, 16

Idealism: German, 14, 127;
objective, 291; Platonic,
84 ff., 94, 103 f., 191, 200,
204, 300
Idiot, The, 140
Immoralist, 178
Immortality, 77, 94, 135, 176
Impressionists, 48
Incarnation of Jesus, 93, 94

Indeterminacy, Principle of,
38, 4 °

Instant, The, 172
Intuition: in Bergson’s philos¬
ophy, 14 f.; Pascal’s view of,

114, 115

James, Henry, quoted, 33
James, William, 18, 19
Jaspers, Karl, 11, 12, 32, 33,
62, 152, 173, 236, 271
Jesuits, 105, 106, 292
Job, Book of, 71, 73, 74, 75,
78

Journalism, as threat to public
mind, 32

Journals, Kierkegaard’s, 154
Joyce, James, 42, 50, 51, 52,
59, 61

Joyful Wisdom, The, 185, 209
Jung, C. G., 59, 124, 156, 294

Kafka, Franz, 61
Kant, 26, 37, 38, 98, 115, 161,
162, 226, 249, 267, 295,
296, 297, 298, 301
Kierkegaard, Soren, 3, 12, 13,
16, 17, 19 , 77 , 93 , 94 , 95 ,
106, 107, 113, 173, 180, 202,
203; abstractions condemned
by, 270; on aesthetic atti¬
tude, 163-65; appearance of,
152, 153; on appropriation
of truth, 171; as artist, 250;
as bombshell in philosophy,
207; break with Regina Ol¬
sen, 153, 154, 155, 166; and
Christianity, views on, 150,
151, 152, 160, 172-77 pass.,
207; and Communism, 292;
despair studied by, 169;
dread analyzed by, 127, 226;
and Either/Or choice, 154,
162; on ethics, 165-67;
Hegel opposed by, 39, 97,
154, 158, 160, 161, 298; vs.
Heidegger, 237, 238; intelli-

INDEX

gence of, 149, 150, 152;
irony of, 152, 156, 157;
melancholy of, 155, 156;
Platonic scale of values re¬
versed by, 85; prophesy on
role of journalism, 31; psy¬
choanalytic critics of, 153;
as reckoning point of Ref¬
ormation, 29; on religion,
166-76 pass., 207; on Soc¬
rates, 86, 157, 158

Lao-tse, 81, 84, 234
Laplace, 38

Laputa ( Gulliver’s Travels),
120-23 pass., 146
Lawrence, D. H., 132, 178
Laws, The, 87
Leibniz, 96, 106, 203, 217
Letter on Humanism, 208
Literature: modem, 50-54
pass., 59, 62; and Sartre,
250-54

Logic: and eleventh-century
dialecticians, 99; as Greek
invention, 78; Hegel’s use
of, 159 f.; and Wittgenstein,
300, 301

Logical Positivism, 6, 21, 22,
159, 162, 210, 288, 295, 297,
302, 303

Lonely Crowd, The, 173
Lucretius, 163

Luther, Martin, 27, 28, 121,
154 , 183

Malraux, Andr6, 46, 60, 233,
293

Man in the Modem Age, 32
Manet, 43

Marcel, Gabriel, 14, 173, 176,
236

Maritain, Jacques, 101
Marlowe, 129

Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
The, 124

Marxism, 21-22, 33, 34, 138,

311

273, 292. See also Commu¬
nism

Materialism, 34, 291

Mathematics: bias toward es-
sentialism, 106; during cen¬
tury of Enlightenment, 118;
incompleteness of, 39-40,
293; Laputans’ devotion to,
120-21; Plato attracted to,
84

Matisse, 43

Memoirs from the House of the
Dead, 136, 137

Metaphysical Journal, Marcel’s,

14

Metaphysics, Aristotle’s, 286,
288

Meyerson, Emile, 159

Mood, in Heidegger’s philos¬
ophy, 220-21, 223

My Confession, by Tolstoy,
145, 146

Nausea, 241, 251, 253, 254,
258

New Class, The, 273

Nicomachean Ethics, 88

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 13,
16, 24, 72, 85, 91, 95, 113,
124, 129, 133, 150; as artist,
250; atheism of, 184, 185,
186; as bombshell in philos¬
ophy, 207; and Christ, 183;
as classical scholar, 177,198;
on death of God, 182, 185,
186, 203, 209, 238, 244; de¬
lusions of, 181-82; and
Dionysus, 178, 179, 183,
184, 186; and Eternal Re¬
turn, 194-95, 196; and Hei¬
degger, 197, 207, 209, 232,
233, 237; immoralism of,
190 ff.; loneliness of, 180,

182, 188; madness of, 182,

183, 184, 196; on man’s es¬
trangement from himself,
207; on necessity of Church,

312

INDEX

175; and nihilism, 203, 204,
205; as philology professor,
177; quoted, 125, 166, 188,
195; and Sartre, 247, 248;
sickness of, 177, 178, 184;
and Superman, 128, 137,
166, 192, 194, 196; as sys¬
tematic thinker, 197, 200;
and Will to Power, 197-205
pass., 232, 233, 249; and
Z arathustra, 187 ff., 193,
194 , 195

Nihilism, 203, 204, 205, 238,
241, 247, 284
No Exit, 252, 253
Notes from Underground, 138,
139

Nothingness, 65, 185; encoun¬
ter with, 29; in Heidegger’s
philosophy, 226, 238; in
Oriental philosophy, 285;
Pascal’s experience of, 116,
117; in Sartre’s philosophy,
243, 244, 247; as theme in
modern art and literature,
62,63; threat of, 36, 62

Objective truth, 170, 171, 172
Olsen, Regina, 153, 154, 155,
166

On Being and Essence, 108
On the Nature of Truth, 230
Oresteia, 276

Organization Man, The, 173
Original Sin, 28, 226
Ortega y Gasset, Jos6, 16, 102,
173, 271

Parmenides, 81, 87, 116, 159
Pascal, 29, 112, 152; as exis¬
tentialist, 111; mathematical
and intuitive minds differen¬
tiated by, 114-15; and Noth¬
ingness, 116, 117; on philos¬
ophy, 113; quoted, 118;
religious experience of, 116;
as scientific genius, 113

Passage to India, A, 54
Pauli, Von, 38

Peirce, Charles Sanders, 19
PensSes, Pascal’s, 116
Phaedrus, 82, 86
Phenomenology, 213, 214, 215
Philosophy: ancient, 5, 6; An¬
glo-American, and reaction
to Existentialism, 9 f,, 21;
beginning of Western, 4;
Being as central concept of,
210; and dualism of subject
and object, 249; existentialist
trend of, 18; modern, posi¬
tion of, 3 ff., 6, 7; Oriental,
5 . 55 - 56 , 231, 234, 237; Pas¬
cal’s view of, 113; and philo¬
sophical anthropology, 11,
236; as profession, 4, 5, 6;
professional deformation in,
5 , 9, 159; Scholastic (medie¬
val), 26, 27, 105, 106, 117;
specialization of, 6, 7; tech¬
nique in, preoccupation
with, 6
Picasso, 42

Plato, 5, 39, 72, 76, 77, 79, 81,
88, 95, 96, 305; as aesthete,
164; and doctrine of Ideas,
84, 85, 94, 103 f., 191, 200,
204, 300; existential aspect
of, 80, 86; Homer con¬
demned by, 286; on meaning
of truth, 230; rationalism of,
82-86 pass.; and Socrates in
later dialogues, 87
Plato’s Theory of Truth, 230
Plotinus, 96
Poetics, Aristotle’s, 50
Poetry: and Rimbaud, 131,
132; as substitute for reli¬
gion, 130

Positivism, 6, 21, 22, 159, 162,
210, 288, 295, 297, 302, 303
Possessed, The, 138
Pragmatism, 18, 19, 162, 297
Present Age, The, 173

INDEX 313

Primitivism, in modern art, 132
Professional deformation, 4-5,
9 , 159

Progress, idea of, 118, 138
Protestantism, 27, 28, 29, 33,
75 , 175

Psalms, of Bible, 71, 74,75
Psychoanalysis, 138, 294; ex¬
istential, 254-55, 256; and
sickness of spirit, 170
Pythagoreanism, 39, 84

Rationalism, 268, 269, 274,
279; and Great Chain of Be¬
ing, 64, gi; Greek, 79-91
pass., 110; Hegelian, 159 f.;
of Middle Ages, 26, 27, 98;
and theodicy, 97
Reformation, Protestant, 28,
29 , 76

Religion: and death, as central
issue, 176; decline of, 24-
29, 35 ; and Existentialism,
17-18; Hebraic source of,
72; and James, William, 19;
Kierkegaard’s views on, 166-
77 pass., 207; Orphic, 72;
and Pascal, 113, 116; poetry
as substitute for, 130. See
also Catholic Church; Chris¬
tianity; God; Protestantism
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, 144-
45

Renaissance, 25, 33, 36,43, 46,
47 , 49 , 61

Republic, Plato’s, 83 f., 230
Republic of Silence, The, 239
Resurrection of Jesus, 93, 94
Revolt of the Masses, The, 16
Richards, I. A., 223
Rimbaud, 131, 132, 133, 241
Roads to Liberty, The, 252,
258

Romanticism, 123, 125-33

pass., 143, 146, ig3
Russell, Bertrand, 185, 186,
299, 300, 301

St. Augustine, 95, 96, 97, 101,
111, 112, 118

St. Paul, 28, 92, 93, 94, 100,
260

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 9, 17, 53,
62, 102, 107, 117, 236, 238;
on anxiety, 246; atheism of,
185, 209, 243, 244, 262, 263;
and Baudelaire, 255-56; on
Being, 245, 246, 248, 251,
254, 257, 258; brilliance of,
246; and Communism, 262;
and Descartes, 242, 243,
256; and Evil as real, 247,
273; on facticity, 109; and
freedom, view of, 241-44
pass., 247, 258-63 pass.; and
Heidegger, 238, 242, 246-
49 pass.; as literary man,
250-54; morbid side of, 10,
112; and Nietzsche, 247,
248; on Nothingness, 243,
244, 247; and the Other,
256, 257; and psychology,
existential, 254-61; quoted,
239-40; on sexual love, 257-
58; sources of, 11
Scheler, Max, 12, 64
Schiller, 189, 193
Science: behavioral, man in¬
terpreted in terms of, 292-
93; discovery of, by Greeks,
72; and human finitude,
37 ff.; and Logical Positiv¬
ism, 21; paradoxes of, 37-
40; and Protestantism, 27,
28; specialization of, 6
Scotus, Duns, 100, 101, 102,
104, 105, 118, 244
Second Sex, The, 260
Semantics, 6, 223
Shestov, Leon, 15, 136
Sickness Unto Death, The, 29,
169

Sin, sense of, 71, 78
Skolem, 40

3 1 4

INDEX

Socrates, 4, 5, 71, 80, 86, 87,
101, 145, 157, 158
Solovev, Vladimir, 15
Sophist, The, 86, 87, 286
Sophocles, 79

Sound and the Fury, The, 50,
52 , 56

Speech, in Heidegger’s philos¬
ophy, 222-24

Spinoza, 106, 114, 145, 164,
291

Spleen, by Baudelaire, 130
State, and collectivization, 30
State and Revolution, 274
Stendhal, 199
Suarez, Francis, 105
Subjective truth, 170, 171, 172
Summa Theologica, 100, 113
Superman, Nietzschean, 128,
137. 166. 192 . 194 , 196
Swift, Dean, 120-23 pass.
Symbolism, 130, 133, 146

Taoism, 60, 234, 285
Technology, 201, 202, 269, 275
Tertullian, 94, 95, 98, 118
Theodicy, 96, 97, 290
Theologians: eleventh-century,
vs. dialecticians, 99; present-
day Protestant, 175
Thus Spake Zarathustra, 181,
184, 186-89 pass-, 193 , 194 ,
195, 201, 237
Timaeus, 80, 96
Time: Faulkner’s description
of, 53 f.; in Heidegger’s
philosophy, 227-28
Tolstoy, 133, 135, 136, 141-
44 pass., 146, 225; existen¬
tialism of, 141; quoted, 141-
42, 144, 145

Tragedy, Greek, 72, 178, 277-
78, 280

Tragic Seme of Life, 16
Training in Christianity, 152
Treatise on the Passions, 291

Ulysses, 50, 51, 52, 59
Unamuno, de, Miguel, 16, 17,
94, 107, 176, 194
Understanding, in Heidegger’s
philosophy, 221-22, 223,

224

Varieties of Religious Experi¬
ence, 19

Voices of Silence, The, 60, 233
Voltaire, 97
Voluntarism, 100, 101

Waiting for Godot, 63, 183
War and Peace, 142
Waste Land, The, 50
Weber, Max, 30
Werther, 128
Weyl, Hermann, 40
What Is Art?, 133
What Is Literature?, 240, 250
Whitehead, A. N., 18, 26, 79,
125, 126

Will to Power, The, 190, 197,
201

Winner Take Nothing, 283
Wittgenstein, 300, 301, 302
Wordsworth, 124-27 pass.,
130, 131, 143; quoted, 125,
126

Works of Love, 152

Yang and Yin, 83

Zarathustra, 181, 184, 186-89
pass., 193, 194, 195, 201,
237